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I just recently watched the "Tabletop Titans" video on how to play Orks in 9th edition. For a quick TL;DW, their assessment of orks was essentially:

Pros: Games last only 5 turns now, and morale is a bit better with huge unsupported hordes, so orks can much more often win games by controlling the board and outlasting their opponent.

Cons: Multicharge, changes to "always fight first" rules and coherency changes make screens even more difficult to deal with as a melee army - their advice was, huddle around KFFs and Painboyz and let the enemy come to you! Also, as one of the three factions in the game that will be bringing 11+ model squads, a lot of enemy lists will gain arbitrary power spikes against you with blast weapons they would be including in their armies.

I finished up the video, sat back in my chair, and thought "Huh, what a perfect encapsulation of why balancing for competitive tournament play DOESN'T automatically make the game better for casual narrative play!"

This is a chestnut oft brought up by the more competitively minded crowd, wishing that GW would just balance for the top-level tournament and ignore "garage hammer" or "Narrative hammer" when it comes to their gameplay changes. As long as the focus is maintained on competitive winrates and keeping the competitive meta diverse, casual players will automatically receive a better, more balanced experience!

Except....

Looking at a faction's winrate in a competitive setting alone to determine how good they're doing, and looking at the # of factions represented in the top-level competitive meta alone to determine overall game health introduces major blindspots that can make the game miserable to actually experience for the players.

Here's some stuff that's perfectly fine in a game balanced around competitive parameters alone:

1) Two factions are narratively supposed to be the "good and evil" opposites of one another. however, the "good" faction has a number of significant gameplay advantages that lead to them absolutely slaughtering the "evil" faction's troops in a straight up fight, requiring the "evil" faction to rely on a few specific combos that revolve around fringe elements of their codex, while the "good" faction can field a well-balanced mix of units that looks like something right off the codex cover art. As long as both have a 50% competitive winrate, this is a healthy game state!

2) A faction can field 4-5 essentially unkillable models at a given game size. Any opponent of them spends the entire game playing a punching bag, often losing all the weapons they could possibly affect their opponent's models turns 1-2. As long as missions rely on board control and the unkillable models do not have above a 50% winrate, this is a healthy game state!

3) A faction whose background is melee-based, belligerent aggression can win 50% of their competitive games, but only by huddling around defensive buffs and screens, sitting on objective markers and taking it on the chin. This is a healthy game state!

4) Meta A includes the following dominant factions: Chaos Space Marines, Eldar, Tau, Orks, Tyranids, Imperial Guard, Dark Eldar, Space Marines. Meta B includes the following dominant factions: Space Marines, Grey Knights, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, Blood Angels, Deathwatch, Eldar, Tau. Meta A and Meta B are exactly as healthy as one another - same number of different factions!

5) For the same number of points, a player can take a super-heavy walker, or 50 light infantry units. At a given game size, most models cannot meaningfully interact with the super-heavy walker, while most weapons can harm the light infantry models. However, it takes significantly more time to move the light infantry models than the superheavy walker, meaning that it is more important to incentivize players taking the former over the latter in a game designed around ensuring that players can complete a tournament game within the desired timeframe!

You're right in that balancing at the competitive end of the spectrum probably has only weak or moderate effects on what happens at the casual end.

However, I would argue that it's exceedly difficult to balance the casual end because different people/local groups have different ideas of what's fluffy/narrative/broken/etc. Most fluffy armies are unoptimised, but just sometimes a fluffy army happens to be really powerful!

Balancing at the competitive end is more possible because in theory everyone has a more similar mentality of designing the best list, using their best tactics, beating the other person as efficiently as possible, using balanced missions, etc.

ryuken87 wrote:
You're right in that balancing at the competitive end of the spectrum probably has only weak or moderate effects on what happens at the casual end.

However, I would argue that it's exceedly difficult to balance the casual end because different people/local groups have different ideas of what's fluffy/narrative/broken/etc. Most fluffy armies are unoptimised, but just sometimes a fluffy army happens to be really powerful!

Balancing at the competitive end is more possible because in theory everyone has a more similar mentality of designing the best list, using their best tactics, beating the other person as efficiently as possible, using balanced missions, etc.

That is true, but my point is that when you balance solely with competitive winrate in mind, you must ignore several things that are extremely important to players.

1) Do the various factions play in the style they are presented as in the game's fiction? If Orks can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sittting with their thumbs up their butts under KFF and Painboy auras and taking hits for 5 turns, that's A-OK for a game balanced competitively. If Eldar can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sending wave after wave of disposable infantry to their deaths, perfectly fine.

2) Are the lists that achieve a balanced competitive winrate actually fun to play as or against? If absolutely nothing in the game can actually beat space marines in a firefight, and they just carve up any opponent without ever having to move out of their deployment zone, that can be an utterly miserable experience for anyone who plays against them...buuuuut as long as they don't win over 50% of their games, they're fine!

3) is the game actually a fun experience? When you sit down at a table, do you actually have a good time, or do you just spend a brisk 3 hours rolling piles of dice and removing models from the board? Doesn't matter! As long as a solid spread of factions see play at top tables, that is a doubleplusgood healthy game right there! Sure, making pretty much everything die instantly to any attack and making the board so small that all weapons and units start in range turn 1 makes the distinction between factions essentially meaningless, but think how DIVERSE the competitive meta will be!

Any developer worth his salt knows that balancing for the top end of the competitive bracket of a game is a completely different beast than balancing the game for the medium or casual level.

Theres a ton of interactions that become clear and easy to top players and help balance the game that are just impossible for less skilled people, making interactive and unfun realities in the gameplay.

The "Git Gud "mentality applied outside some specific instances is just a non sequitur, because becoming better at something doesn't implies that it is actually worth becoming better at that specific skill or that it is even desired to just have a fun time.


8th edition was extremely balanced pre space marine supplements and post february space marine nerf in the competitive level, and assault was probably the most important phase of the game but just to supress your opponent and move around, not to actually kill him. Dominating charges, pile ins and consolidations, tripointing, etc... was probably the most relevant parts of the skillset of a top competitive player of 8th. All of those "skills" are objetively irrelevant and just not a skill worth working for.

But nothing of that applies to mid level or casual level play, and you have a ton and ton of unfun experiences of people being blasted of the table without knowing what has gone wrong because they feel powerless many times by unintuitive interactions.


TLR; A good developer will try to achieve a easy to understand game with intuitive interactions and enough depth so that both casual players can have a fun time and let room for skill to show. But when a casual player loses in a intuitive game to a more skilled one, it is not a unfun experience, because they can understand, even if they aren't capable of doing it, why they have lose. The skill is right there. But in an unintuitive enviroment they'll lose to some abstract rule interaction they just can't wrap their heads around.


All of this becomes even more relevant in warhammer were miniatures are expensive and time consuming to build, paint ,etc... and you can't change your "options" on the whim.

Yes, just looking at tournament wins and loses to see how good a competitive product it is something out of arm-chair developers. It is usefull data of course but not the only relevant one.

All your points are spot on.

I've often wondered what the draw was for the super competitive players. 40k has never been particularly well balanced. There's always the new hotness. Like in 5th edition when everyone ran ultramarines until someone noticed that Salamanders were better. Suddenly we had green marines everywhere, but only until the Space Wolves codex dropped and they started turning gray until the Blood Angels codex came out and they started turning red again. The competitive players don't seem to show any allegiance to any faction. They will always field the best army they can and if they have the resources to buy a whole new army like (again back in the days of 5th) GK or Necrons they will. So again I wonder what the draw is.

If competition is the thing, aren't there much, much better-designed games out there? Is GW's market dominance the only reason? Because it's clear that they don't care about army theme or playstyle.

Afraid I'm struggling to follow the argument.

As I see it balance is an evolving process. In a perfect world everything would be balanced, there would be no trap factions and no trap units and no trap equipment options. Force Org charts would be restored to ensure people couldn't take skew lists (which would be disliked, because people like choice, but if you have choice you can choose to skew.) People would then get reasonably balanced rather than one-sided games.

But that is obviously incredibly hard, and very rarely achieved in any game system I can think of. Even if you had perfection in isolation, some things will tend to be better than other things just because of what meta exists.

While I can appreciate you might not like hiding on KFFs and Painboys (and I'm not sold that is how Orks should play but go with it) - if it works, its better than a system where Orks simply don't work, and are a punching bag for a huge number of other factions in the game - as was the case for Orks (and indeed many other factions) in certain editions of the game.

Having established that each faction has "a competitive build", you can then hopefully try to bring other things into alignment - so you have a range of options. But historically just getting to the first step is a major advance over not having one at all.

I mean as said - *how a faction should play* is to a degree subjective. I think to a degree everyone should be able to play as they like and not get completely creamed - but really, the way to that is to dull the damage of most units in the game. Unfortunately it does not appear GW has not gone down that road (although getting points for everything would confirm it.)

What happens at the top feeds down relatively quickly to everyone else. If something overpowered is identified, it quickly becomes common place. So trying to balance at the top seems to make more sense than trying to balance for two people who don't really know how to play using armies that have been essentially built at random. You want those players to have a good idea - but its unclear that making the game balanced for competitive players hurts that.

I mean I think the blast rule is a screw up that is going to make hordes almost extinct. As far as I can see however this is a rule for casual players. I.E. "Doesn't it suck having 1 shot with your Leman Russ? Now you can blast your opponent's Orks to bits like a tank should by always getting six!"

For competitive players the risk on D6 shots (much like D6 damage) was annoying - but whether you took it or not was still just a question of the points rather than "fun".

I'm not really sure I follow your core argument here - balancing for competitive play is bad because... the current unbalanced game means that the aggressive melee army can only win by huddling up?

Surely the competitive players in this case have identified the flaw in the ork design. Asking them to balance it would logically then move on to trying to fix it, but you seem to suggest that it actually means keeping them in their broken meta state and then tweak points until they win half their games this way.

Tyel wrote:
Afraid I'm struggling to follow the argument.

...

Having established that each faction has "a competitive build", you can then hopefully try to bring other things into alignment

The argument is that competitive balancing efforts cease when each faction has one competitive build without regard to theme, fluff et al. because that's all extraneous noise to the competitive guys who are, apparently,in charge of this process now.

In a game balanced around tournament play, if an army has a list that achieves top tables then that army is balanced from a competitive standpoint.

How well that list achieves the gameplay fantasy of the faction, or represents how that faction is portrayed in the fiction, or whether the list is fun to play as or against, or whether the way that the list wins games is something that casual players might even know about is irrelevant.

You see this in competitive video games a lot: A particular faction, or character, will be either abysmally bad or ridiculously strong when you look at the macro-play data that they collect, but since they balance around organized play, they'll leave that character in that state for years at a time.

Since 40k has no way to collect data from average players, and because the differential between a tournament player and an average player has more to do with, as a beloved Star Wars 1950s diner owner might put it "How good your manners are, how big your pocketbook is" than a player's skill, that would be less of a consistent problem. But the issue of having a winning playstyle that is the antithesis of a faction's intended playstyle seems to be something that is going to be pretty obnoxious going into 9th.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

A.T. wrote:
I'm not really sure I follow your core argument here - balancing for competitive play is bad because... the current unbalanced game means that the aggressive melee army can only win by huddling up?

Surely the competitive players in this case have identified the flaw in the ork design. Asking them to balance it would logically then move on to trying to fix it, but you seem to suggest that it actually means keeping them in their broken meta state and then tweak points until they win half their games this way.

If the aggressive melee army huddling up means they can win 50% of their games, from the competitive players' perspective there is no "current unbalanced game." The game is balanced, and perfectly fine, because the tactic of huddling up is there.

being aggressive with that aggressive melee army is, therefore, a mistake, and they are not in fact an "aggressive melee army" - they are a defensive huddling army!

This is not a playtester's error, it's a Marine bias from both GW AND Playtesters.

Feels like an edition made BY Marines for Marines, moreso than an edition that was thoroughly playtested by competent people.

Maybe the tournament mind set with design isn't always good for narrative games, but it should beats out what GW did in early 8th ed, or when armies are made to sub standard rules.

No army should be X, but worse. Or not ment to be played outside of of closest of friends in a western country.

Having one good build sure beats out having no good build.

Specialy when most of the games being played are not of the narrative kind.

To be fair the Ork codex was made for 8th so if it plays weirdly it is most likely due to some incompatibility between two editions.

Second I'd say that hoping for a narrative/lore appropriate representation is hopeless. Aeldari Aspect Warriors are supposed to be elite and the Aeldari are supposed to be very protective about themselves. Still doesn't change the fact that they fall like flies on the table and the elite aspects do next to nothing unless they are Shining Spears.

What I have found to be true is that it is near impossible to balance for casual gaming. Casual games are super wonky and would require hardcore army construction limits to just make it kinda workable. By balancing for competitive they can at least provide a fighting chance to the army owner even if the outcome can end up pretty stale until a new book comes out. Is it annoying if you are building your army around a different concept? Yes, but at least a solution is provided even if it is not the one someone likes.

Now, to correct myself I think casual can be balanced if the units and rules are simplified considerably. All special rules and shenanigans on datasheets removed. That way you don't have any accidental force multipliers that screw things up. The reason I say that is that a unit with subpar datasheet rules compared to another is usually garbage unless they get so cheap you can use them as dirty chaff on the field.

I agree wholesale.

I noticed this in a recent narrative event with my Slaanesh daemons. I was the talk of the town, winning so many games that my faction of Chaos (Slaanesh Daemons) basically single-handedly took a planet. I got the honor of naming it, making it a daemon world, etc. etc. which is all cool long term fluff...

...but I won the games in totally un-narrative ways. It would be things like:
"BEHOLD, CZUMNETH ERESHKIGAL, ARCHDAEMON OF CARCOSA AND ARCHITECT OF AGONY! SHE IS YOUR DOO-" *deleted by shadwosword*

"A cavorting carnival of Daemonettes, lithely bouncing across the battlefield to deliver the caress of death to unwitting opp-" *aggressor'd*

"Sinusous legs raced through the murky fog, Seekers hollering in a riot of color and sound as they-" *torn apart by intercessors with more attacks in melee after getting the charge*

I won the games through sheer brute stupid. I sat on objectives, pinned the enemy in their DZ, and then finagled my models to be out of LOS as often as possible, wiggling in single-file lines behind a small ruin and gak like that to hold objectives. It left a bad taste in my mouth. But the only alternatives were:
1) Lose my games heroically and narratively, charging forwards the way Slaanesh Daemons would, braying and lusting.
2) Win my games awkwardly and stupidly, becoming "the army to beat" and winning the long-term fluff rewards (and the 'most narrative' award to boot, which is dumb, haha). But doing nothing actually... narrative or thematic. You could've replaced most my army with scoring beer kegs and it wouldn't've had an impact because all they did was hide and die slowly enough to win.

The game is "balanced". Indeed, in the narrative, my daemons became the girls to beat, and the next round of the campaign post-COVID is likely to see that daemon world coming under attack from all sides. But I'm considering just giving up and not playing; I don't know how many more games I can tolerate where my army just gets punching-bag'd to victory, its narrative accomplishments in any given battle being "they were slaughtered wholesale, but a lucky squad of Daemonettes found the macguffin/was standing on some arbitrary point, therefore victory."

At OP, I think a lot of what you say breaks down at the table. A fluffy marine list (especially if not all the new hotness primaris) will probably lead to a good game vs Orks, playing in their themed style. That's where narrative/casual gamers need to have a conversation about the type of game they want and balance the power accordingly.

On the flipside, I am curious to see how 9th truly handles this new balance when players hit the tables again. We know there will be soem skew lists, and it does look like marines will be doing their thing again. And hey, here's a few more new models to add to your lineup...lol. Wait, you already have bikes and AT dudes? nah, nah...just wait til you see these rules.

 bullyboy wrote:
At OP, I think a lot of what you say breaks down at the table. A fluffy marine list (especially if not all the new hotness primaris) will probably lead to a good game vs Orks, playing in their themed style. That's where narrative/casual gamers need to have a conversation about the type of game they want and balance the power accordingly.

On the flipside, I am curious to see how 9th truly handles this new balance when players hit the tables again. We know there will be soem skew lists, and it does look like marines will be doing their thing again. And hey, here's a few more new models to add to your lineup...lol. Wait, you already have bikes and AT dudes? nah, nah...just wait til you see these rules.

9th ed now helpfully gives my fluffy marine opponent

-Automatic max hits on any random shot weapon vs any of my units above min size
-The ability to fight first on my charge phase even on my turn (oh look a helpful new primaris unit that just happens to have that ability right on his datasheet, what a coinkidink!)
-The ability to cause double or more the casualties from the new coherency rules unless I'm slavishly checking and rechecking my unit's adherence to new coherency
-Removal of my ability to fight with 3 rows of orks thanks to the new 1/2" engagement range rule
-dense terrain that cuts my shooting effectiveness by 45% while cutting my opponent's shooting effectiveness by 12%
-A new board size with deployment zones small enough that I can't fit my army physically inside them

But because in competitive play, someone can squat on objectives under a KFF bubble and survive 5 turns, orks are perfectly fine and need no changes. In fact, they may need nerfs if the KFF-huddling strategy is effective enough!

the_scotsman wrote:

ryuken87 wrote:
You're right in that balancing at the competitive end of the spectrum probably has only weak or moderate effects on what happens at the casual end.

However, I would argue that it's exceedly difficult to balance the casual end because different people/local groups have different ideas of what's fluffy/narrative/broken/etc. Most fluffy armies are unoptimised, but just sometimes a fluffy army happens to be really powerful!

Balancing at the competitive end is more possible because in theory everyone has a more similar mentality of designing the best list, using their best tactics, beating the other person as efficiently as possible, using balanced missions, etc.

That is true, but my point is that when you balance solely with competitive winrate in mind, you must ignore several things that are extremely important to players.

1) Do the various factions play in the style they are presented as in the game's fiction? If Orks can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sittting with their thumbs up their butts under KFF and Painboy auras and taking hits for 5 turns, that's A-OK for a game balanced competitively. If Eldar can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sending wave after wave of disposable infantry to their deaths, perfectly fine.

2) Are the lists that achieve a balanced competitive winrate actually fun to play as or against? If absolutely nothing in the game can actually beat space marines in a firefight, and they just carve up any opponent without ever having to move out of their deployment zone, that can be an utterly miserable experience for anyone who plays against them...buuuuut as long as they don't win over 50% of their games, they're fine!

3) is the game actually a fun experience? When you sit down at a table, do you actually have a good time, or do you just spend a brisk 3 hours rolling piles of dice and removing models from the board? Doesn't matter! As long as a solid spread of factions see play at top tables, that is a doubleplusgood healthy game right there! Sure, making pretty much everything die instantly to any attack and making the board so small that all weapons and units start in range turn 1 makes the distinction between factions essentially meaningless, but think how DIVERSE the competitive meta will be!

Point 1 isn't a balance issue, it's an army design issue. If GW makes an Ork codex that's effectively designed around bunkering down under defensive auras, that's a failure at the design stage.

Point 2 is subjective, your description is also dripping in hyperbole. Even besides that, if nothing in the game can beat space marines in a firefight that's a failure of balance, not a result of the game being designed for competitive level games.

Point 3 is also subjective. Evenly matched armies make for incredibly fun games in my opinion, you might not agree. The so called 'supporting points' are just more examples of failures of balance or just your imagination running wild. The board is 4" shorting and no man's land hasn't changed at all. All that means is that you can't RETREAT as far, so that 'marines win every firefight' problem from earlier should be much easier to deal with.

This is all just a combination of misunderstanding what competitive balance is, blaming attempts to balance the game for totally unrelated failures in thematic army design, with a lot of unfounded outrage/fear over things that haven't happened yet.

It's not got much to do with competitive play per se, it's more a side effect of turning 9th into a shooting edition by vastly nerfing LOS-blocking compared to what was the standard in competitive 8th edition, and at the same time moving to progressive scoring.

It doesn't take a genius to see that the orky playstyle of flooding forward and beating stuff up isn't going to work well in a game where you (1) win by holding objectives at the start of your turn and (2) fall back is baseline free, can be done even when wrapped, and there are no countermeasures in the ork codex.

ERJAK wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:

ryuken87 wrote:
You're right in that balancing at the competitive end of the spectrum probably has only weak or moderate effects on what happens at the casual end.

However, I would argue that it's exceedly difficult to balance the casual end because different people/local groups have different ideas of what's fluffy/narrative/broken/etc. Most fluffy armies are unoptimised, but just sometimes a fluffy army happens to be really powerful!

Balancing at the competitive end is more possible because in theory everyone has a more similar mentality of designing the best list, using their best tactics, beating the other person as efficiently as possible, using balanced missions, etc.

That is true, but my point is that when you balance solely with competitive winrate in mind, you must ignore several things that are extremely important to players.

1) Do the various factions play in the style they are presented as in the game's fiction? If Orks can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sittting with their thumbs up their butts under KFF and Painboy auras and taking hits for 5 turns, that's A-OK for a game balanced competitively. If Eldar can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sending wave after wave of disposable infantry to their deaths, perfectly fine.

2) Are the lists that achieve a balanced competitive winrate actually fun to play as or against? If absolutely nothing in the game can actually beat space marines in a firefight, and they just carve up any opponent without ever having to move out of their deployment zone, that can be an utterly miserable experience for anyone who plays against them...buuuuut as long as they don't win over 50% of their games, they're fine!

3) is the game actually a fun experience? When you sit down at a table, do you actually have a good time, or do you just spend a brisk 3 hours rolling piles of dice and removing models from the board? Doesn't matter! As long as a solid spread of factions see play at top tables, that is a doubleplusgood healthy game right there! Sure, making pretty much everything die instantly to any attack and making the board so small that all weapons and units start in range turn 1 makes the distinction between factions essentially meaningless, but think how DIVERSE the competitive meta will be!

Point 1 isn't a balance issue, it's an army design issue. If GW makes an Ork codex that's effectively designed around bunkering down under defensive auras, that's a failure at the design stage.

Point 2 is subjective, your description is also dripping in hyperbole. Even besides that, if nothing in the game can beat space marines in a firefight that's a failure of balance, not a result of the game being designed for competitive level games.

Point 3 is also subjective. Evenly matched armies make for incredibly fun games in my opinion, you might not agree. The so called 'supporting points' are just more examples of failures of balance or just your imagination running wild. The board is 4" shorting and no man's land hasn't changed at all. All that means is that you can't RETREAT as far, so that 'marines win every firefight' problem from earlier should be much easier to deal with.

This is all just a combination of misunderstanding what competitive balance is, blaming attempts to balance the game for totally unrelated failures in thematic army design, with a lot of unfounded outrage/fear over things that haven't happened yet.

That's my point, though. The argument of "let competitive players balance the game" LEADS to failures in design. of course those are all failures in design: If competitive balance rather than design is the focus, then design will suffer.

As we are seeing, right now, with the horrible design present in the 9th edition core rules.

The core rules that appear, at least to me, to be designed around creating a game state where the greatest amount of player skill expression is in micromanagement of model placement, spacing, and movement.

9th is a game state where you can easily double the casualties you can inflict on your opponent by knowing the intricasies of the new coherency rule better than them. Or where you can double your potential targets with a shooting unit by knowing the precise wording of the new Obscuring Terrain rule. This is excellent for competitive tournament play, and absolute dogshit design.

the_scotsman wrote:
If the aggressive melee army huddling up means they can win 50% of their games, from the competitive players' perspective there is no "current unbalanced game." The game is balanced, and perfectly fine, because the tactic of huddling up is there.

Games like starcraft 2, which are rebalanced based on the competitive scene, don't have only a single strict build per faction that wins 50% of the time.

Because the goal of balancing wargaming factions for competitive play isn't to boil them all down to one list.

OP only has a point if GW was good at all with "casual" design, and the truth is they aren't.

the_scotsman wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
At OP, I think a lot of what you say breaks down at the table. A fluffy marine list (especially if not all the new hotness primaris) will probably lead to a good game vs Orks, playing in their themed style. That's where narrative/casual gamers need to have a conversation about the type of game they want and balance the power accordingly.

On the flipside, I am curious to see how 9th truly handles this new balance when players hit the tables again. We know there will be soem skew lists, and it does look like marines will be doing their thing again. And hey, here's a few more new models to add to your lineup...lol. Wait, you already have bikes and AT dudes? nah, nah...just wait til you see these rules.

9th ed now helpfully gives my fluffy marine opponent

-Automatic max hits on any random shot weapon vs any of my units above min size
-The ability to fight first on my charge phase even on my turn (oh look a helpful new primaris unit that just happens to have that ability right on his datasheet, what a coinkidink!)
-The ability to cause double or more the casualties from the new coherency rules unless I'm slavishly checking and rechecking my unit's adherence to new coherency
-Removal of my ability to fight with 3 rows of orks thanks to the new 1/2" engagement range rule
-dense terrain that cuts my shooting effectiveness by 45% while cutting my opponent's shooting effectiveness by 12%
-A new board size with deployment zones small enough that I can't fit my army physically inside them

But because in competitive play, someone can squat on objectives under a KFF bubble and survive 5 turns, orks are perfectly fine and need no changes. In fact, they may need nerfs if the KFF-huddling strategy is effective enough!

-Which is true of basically every faction and is thematic as all hell. A cannonball kills more people when fired in to a block of 300 than a block of 3.
-A lot of armies have these abilities. Slaanesh and DE are all about that stuff. Oh no, one mediocre beatstick character gets an incredibly common melee ability. Shock. Horror.
-Which is true of any unit that fails a morale check, and is actually on average BETTER for hordes than it used to be because now you have a 16% chance of passing the test outright even if you lose 50 models in a 51 model unit with Lead 3. Take a boys unit that loses 20 models. In 8th that unit was just dead. In 9th you have a chance to not lose anything AND will only lose 3 more boyz on average.
-Or you could just put your boyz closer together? It's honestly not particularly hard to stay within 2" of 2 models with bases less barely an inch wide.
-This is annoying but is solvable, don't put your orkz in 3 rows.
-So? You have 100X the number of shots a space marine army does and now he can't stack those buffs to screw everyone else in the game up.
-You should be outflanking on the smaller boards with at least some of those units, not because you have to but because it's just better.


Also, you've overplayed your hand here. You don't give one runny dump about competitive balance or thematic army construction, or fun play. That's not what any of this has been about.

You are 100% just salty that you think marines will still be OP in 9th and that your faction might not be as good. You're trying to hide it behind blaming competitive players and competitive balance and army design or whatever, but it's just salt. If Marines are OP it's because GW made a mistake in re-pointing them out of fear of making their cash cow less profitable, not a result of 'competitive players balancing the game around competitive play!'

At least when I whine about Eradicators I admit that I'm salty because they're 3x better than my retributors with only 8 points per model more.

It is hard to compare the balance in starcraft and in table top games though. Both require training to learn how to play properly, but people playing starcraft, RTS or MOBAs, don't have to spend money like table top playing people have to, if they decide to switch armies.

There is a huge difference between changing the comp of build in star craft and making a 800+$ army bad for a seson or two. Specialy when GW updating isn't no where near as fast as that the exists for digital mediums.

ERJAK wrote:
Point 1 isn't a balance issue, it's an army design issue. If GW makes an Ork codex that's effectively designed around bunkering down under defensive auras, that's a failure at the design stage.

Point 2 is subjective, your description is also dripping in hyperbole. Even besides that, if nothing in the game can beat space marines in a firefight that's a failure of balance, not a result of the game being designed for competitive level games.

Point 3 is also subjective. Evenly matched armies make for incredibly fun games in my opinion, you might not agree. The so called 'supporting points' are just more examples of failures of balance or just your imagination running wild. The board is 4" shorting and no man's land hasn't changed at all. All that means is that you can't RETREAT as far, so that 'marines win every firefight' problem from earlier should be much easier to deal with.

This is all just a combination of misunderstanding what competitive balance is, blaming attempts to balance the game for totally unrelated failures in thematic army design, with a lot of unfounded outrage/fear over things that haven't happened yet.

The entire point of playtesting is to reveal those design errors; saying 'it's not the playtesters at fault for not reporting design problems, it's the designer's fault for creating those problems' is completely missing the point.

If the playtesters are giving the thumbs-up on the current game state because their primary concern is mechanical balance, with no investment in whether the game matches the theme and fiction or is inherently fun to play, that's a problem with the playtesting- more specifically the demographics chosen for playtesting.

Videogame developers typically use a mixture of casual and competitive players for playtesting for this exact reason. Competitive playtesters are great for determining whether something is balanced at a high level of competitive play. Casual players are better for determining whether something is actually fun to play to begin with for a majority of the consumer base. If you don't use playtester demographics that match your target audience, the game is going to suffer.

the_scotsman wrote:
In a game balanced around tournament play, if an army has a list that achieves top tables then that army is balanced from a competitive standpoint.

How well that list achieves the gameplay fantasy of the faction, or represents how that faction is portrayed in the fiction, or whether the list is fun to play as or against, or whether the way that the list wins games is something that casual players might even know about is irrelevant.

You see this in competitive video games a lot: A particular faction, or character, will be either abysmally bad or ridiculously strong when you look at the macro-play data that they collect, but since they balance around organized play, they'll leave that character in that state for years at a time.

Since 40k has no way to collect data from average players, and because the differential between a tournament player and an average player has more to do with, as a beloved Star Wars 1950s diner owner might put it "How good your manners are, how big your pocketbook is" than a player's skill, that would be less of a consistent problem. But the issue of having a winning playstyle that is the antithesis of a faction's intended playstyle seems to be something that is going to be pretty obnoxious going into 9th.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

A.T. wrote:
I'm not really sure I follow your core argument here - balancing for competitive play is bad because... the current unbalanced game means that the aggressive melee army can only win by huddling up?

Surely the competitive players in this case have identified the flaw in the ork design. Asking them to balance it would logically then move on to trying to fix it, but you seem to suggest that it actually means keeping them in their broken meta state and then tweak points until they win half their games this way.

If the aggressive melee army huddling up means they can win 50% of their games, from the competitive players' perspective there is no "current unbalanced game." The game is balanced, and perfectly fine, because the tactic of huddling up is there.

being aggressive with that aggressive melee army is, therefore, a mistake, and they are not in fact an "aggressive melee army" - they are a defensive huddling army!

1) You're far too premature
2) GW producing a tournament mission pack gets everyone on the same page - as long as we force ITC there, too
3) Things like forcing relics, strats, and spells on rosters gives us more data for what is used and how armies work
4) The painting requirement creates a difficult hurdle for meta-chasing (assuming it is followed)
5) Asserting that play-testers know that *a* build exists =/= play-testers are satisfied

People need to stop conceptualizing melee as "I get to your deployment zone and smack you around". That's stupid and non-objective based gameplay. Controlling the board is the game now *as it should be*. Melee happens mid-table and not in the opponent's zone.

ERJAK wrote:

Spoiler:

the_scotsman wrote:

ryuken87 wrote:
You're right in that balancing at the competitive end of the spectrum probably has only weak or moderate effects on what happens at the casual end.

However, I would argue that it's exceedly difficult to balance the casual end because different people/local groups have different ideas of what's fluffy/narrative/broken/etc. Most fluffy armies are unoptimised, but just sometimes a fluffy army happens to be really powerful!

Balancing at the competitive end is more possible because in theory everyone has a more similar mentality of designing the best list, using their best tactics, beating the other person as efficiently as possible, using balanced missions, etc.

That is true, but my point is that when you balance solely with competitive winrate in mind, you must ignore several things that are extremely important to players.

1) Do the various factions play in the style they are presented as in the game's fiction? If Orks can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sittting with their thumbs up their butts under KFF and Painboy auras and taking hits for 5 turns, that's A-OK for a game balanced competitively. If Eldar can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sending wave after wave of disposable infantry to their deaths, perfectly fine.

2) Are the lists that achieve a balanced competitive winrate actually fun to play as or against? If absolutely nothing in the game can actually beat space marines in a firefight, and they just carve up any opponent without ever having to move out of their deployment zone, that can be an utterly miserable experience for anyone who plays against them...buuuuut as long as they don't win over 50% of their games, they're fine!

3) is the game actually a fun experience? When you sit down at a table, do you actually have a good time, or do you just spend a brisk 3 hours rolling piles of dice and removing models from the board? Doesn't matter! As long as a solid spread of factions see play at top tables, that is a doubleplusgood healthy game right there! Sure, making pretty much everything die instantly to any attack and making the board so small that all weapons and units start in range turn 1 makes the distinction between factions essentially meaningless, but think how DIVERSE the competitive meta will be!

Point 1 isn't a balance issue, it's an army design issue. If GW makes an Ork codex that's effectively designed around bunkering down under defensive auras, that's a failure at the design stage.

The problem is that the design stage doesn't get feedback on anything except balance from tournament results. This is the problem with quantitative and qualitative data; tournaments provide quantitative data (e.g. winrates) but not qualitative data - at least not beyond what "the warhammer community guys wandered around and looked at the armies" is. And even that doesn't actually inform how the army plays; it merely informs the types of lists that are being built. If you want to get to how the army plays, you need to look elsewhere than competitive tournaments for data - or, if you want to look at competitive tournaments, you need to have a clearly defined "I WANT THE ARMY TO DO X" understanding as a baseline for comparison.

ERJAK wrote:
Point 2 is subjective, your description is also dripping in hyperbole. Even besides that, if nothing in the game can beat space marines in a firefight that's a failure of balance, not a result of the game being designed for competitive level games.

It's not a failure of balance if there's a 50% win rate, that's the problem. The issue the_scotsman is pointing out is that "competitive balance" is not the exact same as "fun".

ERJAK wrote:
Point 3 is also subjective. Evenly matched armies make for incredibly fun games in my opinion, you might not agree. The so called 'supporting points' are just more examples of failures of balance or just your imagination running wild. The board is 4" shorting and no man's land hasn't changed at all. All that means is that you can't RETREAT as far, so that 'marines win every firefight' problem from earlier should be much easier to deal with.

Again, "evenly matched" isn't sufficient for "fun". It's possible for armies to be evenly matched without the game being fun, therefore "evenly matched" is necessary, but not sufficient - and tournament data can only get you to the 'evenly matched' state, which is not sufficient.

ERJAK wrote:
This is all just a combination of misunderstanding what competitive balance is, blaming attempts to balance the game for totally unrelated failures in thematic army design, with a lot of unfounded outrage/fear over things that haven't happened yet.

Things have happened like this all through 8th. Did you read my example post about how it poisoned a narrative campaign experience for me?

And no, it's not blaming attempts to balance the game for unrelated failures in thematic army design. It is pointing out that "balancing around tournament players" isn't enough, it's not sufficient, to make a fun game. So the source of balancing and army design input should be elsewhere, or at least augmented by another source.

A.T. wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
If the aggressive melee army huddling up means they can win 50% of their games, from the competitive players' perspective there is no "current unbalanced game." The game is balanced, and perfectly fine, because the tactic of huddling up is there.

Games like starcraft 2, which are rebalanced based on the competitive scene, don't have only a single strict build per faction that wins 50% of the time.

Because the goal of balancing wargaming factions for competitive play isn't to boil them all down to one list.

Like I said in my last post, he doesn't care about competitive play or competitive players balancing the game. He's salty about marines, and to a lesser extent orkz and trying to smokescreen it as a systematic issue rather than just whining, which until points come out for both factions it pretty much is. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of whining, but blaming every competitive player ever because Greentide Orkz don't faceroll win as often as you would like is silly. Especially considering we don't actually know that Greentide Orkz aren't a 95% winrate strat until we actually get into the edition. For all we know Ork Boyz went down 3 points a model.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
People need to stop conceptualizing melee as "I get to your deployment zone and smack you around". That's stupid and non-objective based gameplay. Controlling the board is the game now *as it should be*. Melee happens mid-table and not in the opponent's zone.

That's not how the fluff is written, though. Slaanesh Daemons don't wander onto objectives and dig in for the long haul. The army theme should be, indeed, "I get to your army and smack you around." Because that's their fluff, and it's what they do. "Controlling territory" isn't and should never be how Daemons work when fighting an army in reality; indeed, in the long run its quite impossible for them to hold ground because the warp will fade and reality will reassert itself.

In 30k, Daemons get their own objectives to choose from and can ignore the primary mission for precisely this reason - "Go and stand on a point for an arbitrary length of time" isn't very daemon-y. Nor is it orky, nor world-eaters-y, etc.

"Board control" is a competitive concern, not a narrative one. Which is precisely the problem.

I've often wondered what the draw was for the super competitive players

* the massive player base. Gittin gud and being seen on the international level as gittin gud is a huge ego draw.

* the massive player base. Money money money. Cottage industries pop up like livestreams.

* the massive player base.

I have pointed this EXACT SAME ARGUMENT many times, in the AOS forum mostly where its seen as "the game is great balance because tournaments are not won by the same faction" and then I remember my last AOS game where I brought a "for fun" slaanesh army with one keeper and got demolished by the triple keeper of secrets army that summoned +1800 points on top of his 2000 points. No one is going to have a fun game playing 3800 pts vs 2000 pts. No one. And the rules allow that.

40k is similar. My last 40k game I brought a for fun rubric marine army. And faced a "for fun" ITC 5 knight army that tabled me in two turns. The game lets them do that. The game is not balanced, I don't care what it looks like at the ITC top tables... the game is not balanced.

I am a game designer. I have been for many years. I have played dozens upon dozens of games. And it is true NO GAME is perfectly balanced, but most games get a lot closer than this mess. These imbalances are done intentionally to move models and to appease to the hyper spike crowd that must win games. They are following the magic the gathering design protocols almost to a "T". And they are rewarded with forklifts of money so why change?

ERJAK wrote:

A.T. wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
If the aggressive melee army huddling up means they can win 50% of their games, from the competitive players' perspective there is no "current unbalanced game." The game is balanced, and perfectly fine, because the tactic of huddling up is there.

Games like starcraft 2, which are rebalanced based on the competitive scene, don't have only a single strict build per faction that wins 50% of the time.

Because the goal of balancing wargaming factions for competitive play isn't to boil them all down to one list.

Like I said in my last post, he doesn't care about competitive play or competitive players balancing the game. He's salty about marines, and to a lesser extent orkz and trying to smokescreen it as a systematic issue rather than just whining, which until points come out for both factions it pretty much is. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of whining, but blaming every competitive player ever because Greentide Orkz don't faceroll win as often as you would like is silly. Especially considering we don't actually know that Greentide Orkz aren't a 95% winrate strat until we actually get into the edition. For all we know Ork Boyz went down 3 points a model.

I think he makes a good point and you're dismissing him unreasonably (as well as ignoring my replies to your posts).

ERJAK wrote:

A.T. wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
If the aggressive melee army huddling up means they can win 50% of their games, from the competitive players' perspective there is no "current unbalanced game." The game is balanced, and perfectly fine, because the tactic of huddling up is there.

Games like starcraft 2, which are rebalanced based on the competitive scene, don't have only a single strict build per faction that wins 50% of the time.

Because the goal of balancing wargaming factions for competitive play isn't to boil them all down to one list.

Like I said in my last post, he doesn't care about competitive play or competitive players balancing the game. He's salty about marines, and to a lesser extent orkz and trying to smokescreen it as a systematic issue rather than just whining, which until points come out for both factions it pretty much is. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of whining, but blaming every competitive player ever because Greentide Orkz don't faceroll win as often as you would like is silly. Especially considering we don't actually know that Greentide Orkz aren't a 95% winrate strat until we actually get into the edition. For all we know Ork Boyz went down 3 points a model.

The new coherency rule or anti-multicharge rule, that grants a player who knows how to precisely micromanage his screens or model placement a huge advantage over an opponent who doesn't, has nothing to do with marines. It is an example of a rule that provides a great lever for skill expression in a game designed for tournament play, that is also massively fething miserable for casual play because all it does is give TFG Mcdouchenozzle an opportunity to point and go "Ha ha, your ork here is 2.05" from the second model instead of 2.00" so in the middle of this shooting sequence he's AUTOMATICALLY DEAD hahahaahah!"

It's no different from any of the other rules throughout the 8th-9th era that have been good for competitive play and terrible for casual play. When the game is designed solely with tournament players in mind, everything else doesn't get better, it suffers because weird unintuitive gameplay micromanagement tricks is great for competitive skill expression and gak for playing a game and having fun.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that they've seemingly removed SOME of those tricks that were annoying in 8th - but they didn't actually remove them. They COULD have just made Consolidate and Pile in moves "Directly toward" instead of "must end your move closer" - that would have been a simple, easy way to remove wrapping and trapping. But instead, they went with a combination of 3 different mechanics that keeps it in there...but only if you're a highly skillful, elite competitive gamer who knows how to cunningly micromanage your models, and now instead of it being an all or nothing huge advantage, it's just a little bonus you get in there that forces your opponent to lose 1/6 of his unit and spend 2CP to get out of it.