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To the OP, you are actually doing a bit of confusion on the terms.

You talk about balance, but you present cases only on a subset of the concept of balance, which is the external balance.

If the design cares only for external balance, then you indeed have spotted the most egregious problems.

A design though doesn't focus only on external balance, it also takes into account the internal balance, which is what you are asking for. I don't care if nidzilla is competitive if all forms of nid infantry are trash, I want both playstyles to be supported.

Fortunately, GW has shown quite a lot of interest in internal balance during 8th. Almost all the changes that you saw in CA 20XX were done to improve internal balance, while the FAQs were exclusively for external balance.

This led all factions to have quite a good number of possible design choices. Now, if you played ITC you may not have noticed that, because ITC was designed to improve external balance while murderizing internal balance, but standard 8th did show a lot of freedom in list creation.

Spoletta wrote:
To the OP, you are actually doing a bit of confusion on the terms.

You talk about balance, but you present cases only on a subset of the concept of balance, which is the external balance.

If the design cares only for external balance, then you indeed have spotted the most egregious problems.

A design though doesn't focus only on external balance, it also takes into account the internal balance, which is what you are asking for. I don't care if nidzilla is competitive if all forms of nid infantry are trash, I want both playstyles to be supported.

Fortunately, GW has shown quite a lot of interest in internal balance during 8th. Almost all the changes that you saw in CA 20XX were done to improve internal balance, while the FAQs were exclusively for external balance.

This led all factions to have quite a good number of possible design choices. Now, if you played ITC you may not have noticed that, because ITC was designed to improve external balance while murderizing internal balance, but standard 8th did show a lot of freedom in list creation.

Even internal balance is fundamentally flawed, though, if army design is off.

For example, Slaanesh Daemons are a melee army. How do you balance them? Well, apparently, you allow them greater board control than their opponents. That's what melee armies 'do', how they 'function'. A codex that is appropriately internally balanced around the ability for the units to execute board control, and externally balanced with a 50% winrate, is conceivably possible and, indeed, is well-balanced and can take several different lists. The problem is that these lists are built around board control as their primary objective...

...i.e. the problem is the resulting internally and externally balanced army is about as far away from the lore for Slaanesh Daemons as it could be.

 Arschbombe wrote:
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.

Yeah - I'm getting that now.
Unfortunately I just don't think its true - or rather its making the perfect the enemy of the good.

What for instance is the evidence that GW think "Orks are fine if they win X tournament games"?
I think GW gets data basically through tournaments - and people sending their complaints.

I'm pretty confident *blast* is an evolution of *we all hate that the Exorcist has D6 shots*. So they changed the exorcist. But someone somewhere no doubt said "what's good for Sisters has to be good for everyone else".
But making everything loads of D3s would perhaps be a bit annoying. So lets try "this".
Unfortunately what its done has been to make hordes extinct - and because its such a huge swing, its very hard to see how it would ever be pointed correctly.

But as I see it GW either *tries* to balance for the competitive end - or they just don't balance. The same is largely true for every game system I can think of. For most of 40k's history, if you got a bad codex, you just had to lump it for 2-4-10 years.
I think the evidence is that they are now trying - mainly because they are listening to competitive players tell (and show) them that this or that is good or bad.
Which isn't to say they get it right - but if they stop listening to competitive players, we will go back to the trainwreck we had before.

ERJAK wrote:
For all we know Ork Boyz went down 3 points a model.

Here's another great example of why raw competitive balance isn't the be-all and end-all: For Orks it's expected that they'd be a cheap horde, but what about Eldar Aspect Warriors or Chaos Marines? Players who are invested in their fluff as veterans and specialists will be disappointed by their ostensibly elite units getting points cuts to make them competitively viable, turning them into a horde army.

If you solicit general feedback focusing on competitive balance, and use tournament players as your player sample, you will never hear that this is a problem. Those players have no investment in the fluff concept of Aspect Warriors and don't see it as an issue. Using more narrative-focused players may not yield optimal results for balance, but it will tell you when a faction doesn't feel right.

OP's point about Orks winning through holding objectives is much the same: Competitively, it may be balanced for Orks to win through camping objectives in defensive auras. Narratively, that doesn't feel right at all.

It's not like this is an insurmountable problem- even just asking competitive players 'we expect an army to look like such and such, and plays in such and such a way, does it work?' would tell you whether the result matches the intent. Pair that with a cadre of casual playtesters to try out the game and report back on whether the mechanics as implemented are fun, and you cover all bases. The key is recognizing that competitive balance is not the only goal, and structuring the playtesting accordingly.

Spoletta wrote:
To the OP, you are actually doing a bit of confusion on the terms.

You talk about balance, but you present cases only on a subset of the concept of balance, which is the external balance.

If the design cares only for external balance, then you indeed have spotted the most egregious problems.

A design though doesn't focus only on external balance, it also takes into account the internal balance, which is what you are asking for. I don't care if nidzilla is competitive if all forms of nid infantry are trash, I want both playstyles to be supported.

Fortunately, GW has shown quite a lot of interest in internal balance during 8th. Almost all the changes that you saw in CA 20XX were done to improve internal balance, while the FAQs were exclusively for external balance.

This led all factions to have quite a good number of possible design choices. Now, if you played ITC you may not have noticed that, because ITC was designed to improve external balance while murderizing internal balance, but standard 8th did show a lot of freedom in list creation.

So ITC, a competitive tournament organization, was focused only on external balance between codexes rather than ensuring that a diversity of playstyles and options were available.

While core 8th edition appeared to be focused on a mixture of both, rather than handing balance over entirely to competitive, tournament playstyle.

And now we have 9th coming out, and every piece of commentary we have on it happens to be coincidentally from competitive tournament players, the designers are very carefully working tournament language into their previews, the rules are written legalistically, and all the new missions and rules changes are copying what ITC was doing.

....and you're saying that I'M missing the point?

8th good, ITC bad: We agree.

9th = ITC: you not seeing this yet?

Indeed. The fundamental disconnect seems to be summed up in the OP:

"[Army] is fine, because [army] can win a good number of games and has the tools to execute solid winning strategies." - reviewers/tournament gamers.

"[Army] is not fine because the way [army] plays on the table top is nothing whatsoever like how it plays in the lore, irrespective of how well it can win and what tools it has to win that way." - casual/narrative gamers

It is possible for the first to be true, and the second to also be true. Balancing around the first alone is, therefore, flawed - at least if you care at all what the second category of people think.

I don’t get what OP’s trying to propose here. The argument I’m seeing sounds like “Competive players shouldn’t balance 40k, because competitive armies have to use unusual tactics against other competitive armies in order to win, rather than play like how the army is supposed to in the fluff.” What does this have to do with casual play? The whole point of casual play is to bring lists and play missions that support the fluff in a way that creates cinematic moments. The players in these games are still trying to win, but it’s not the main reason people play casually. Therefore the ork player in you’re scenario can bulrush his opponent with the confidence in knowing his opponent probably didn’t bring a list which is designed to massively punish his orks for this decision. In other words, casual play is self balanced by the fact that both players are interested in having a narratively interesting game.

All the rest of your arguments are strawmanning opinions onto competitive players that they simply don’t have. No competitive player I’ve spoken to would say a near pure marine meta is just as good as a meta which includes chaos and xeno’s faction. Otherwise we wouldn’t have seen the near the same amount of marine hate on competitive forums as we did. No competitive player I’ve spoken to thinks it’s fine for faction to have 1 or 2 viable lists, playstyles, and/or units, Otherwise we wouldn’t have seen nearly as much complaining about during 8th. It’s true that competitive players are more ok when higher skill floor factions require tricks and skill to win with, but good game systems should have factions that do better at top levels vs more casual games, Finally the big assumption you’re making here is thinking that competitive players are ok with imbalance at a causal level. I can assure you nobody thinks it’s ok for a causal marine list to beat any other casual list simply because it’s a marine list. This is example of both external and internal imbalances and no one likes to see this.

My guess is you’re mistaking a mindset of “there’s no point to complain about game imbalances because doing so does nothing to help me win. Instead I’m going to look for ways to adapt my army and play-style in ways which allow me to win.” with “Imbalances in the game are fine so long as I can still win with my army.”

Finally, you didn’t really propose a way for this game to be balanced beyond “Don’t let competitive players be the only the ones to make balancing decisions.” We already have causal players (GW rules team) designing a great deal of the game, so it makes sense to have competitive players balance it. Are you suggesting we remove the competitive players fully from the game design process and revert to 3-7 edition style rules? Should we simply further limit the amount of control they have?

At this point I think people need realize that GW’s business interests is the biggest threat to in game balance. 8th was very balanced pre-marines, yet all that got ruined simply because GW felt the need to sell more primaris. None of that had to due with competitive playtesters (in almost all discussions about marines 2.0, playtesters heavily implied that GW forced too powerful rules through in order to sell models). Past codex writers have directly stated that GW management forced certain rules through in order to sell models during a new release. Just because this doesn’t allows happen (or always work) doesn’t mean it isn’t a huge problem.

Maybe I am more moderate than the OP, but I am not arguing that competitive players shouldn't be involved in helping the design team balance the game. Rather, I am arguing that they shouldn't solely be responsible for helping the design team balance the game.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 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.

That's what Crusade is for, is it not? The mission drives how the army operates. If the missions for competitive players don't make your army play as you like then don't play those missions.

If you instead want to play a balanced game there are sacrifices made on all sides.

I mean if you really want to follow the fluff then why would Orks ever capture objectives in any game since forever? Surely IG would prefer to set up a nice big defensive line and shoot a bunch while never moving and that's boring as gak.

I am not proposing anything: I'm pointing out that 9th proves the old argument of "casual players should just trust competitive players to design and balance a game, because a game designed by competitive players will always automatically be better for casual play" to be bs.

9th is much better designed for competitive play, and from batreps I've watched and games I've played (obligatory admission that all these are using the current point values, so maybe via some magic spell the point values are all that's needed to make everything perfect) 9th is worse for casual play.

Smaller board size makes maneuver matter less, coherency, character and charge phase changes create many more opportunities for "gotcha" moments, blasts and fight first rule changes create more arbitrary powerspikes for certain rules and models that casual players will stumble into and ruin games.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

That's what Crusade is for, is it not? The mission drives how the army operates. If the missions for competitive players don't make your army play as you like then don't play those missions.

If you instead want to play a balanced game there are sacrifices made on all sides.

I mean if you really want to follow the fluff then why would Orks ever capture objectives in any game since forever? Surely IG would prefer to set up a nice big defensive line and shoot a bunch while never moving and that's boring as gak.

We'll see how crusade handles it, but I don't actually think it's going to handle it well. Plus, Matched Play / Tournament Play tends to be the play standard, irrespective of the narrativeness of the players. For example, the narrative campaign I talked about earlier in the thread used the Matched Play rules.

And the specific nature of those sacrifices is exactly the problem.

And right, your last sentence is literally the point - "how the armies do on the tabletop is unrelated how the armies do in the lore." The Imperial Guard's position in a battle shouldn't be boring - it should be tense. If you don't see how "sit in my DZ behind a defensive line and never move" can be a tense situation, then you should watch Zulu, which is literally a film full of suspense with some pretty damn good battle scenes. It consists of guys sitting largely stationary behind a defensive line.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Maybe I am more moderate than the OP, but I am not arguing that competitive players shouldn't be involved in helping the design team balance the game. Rather, I am arguing that they shouldn't solely be responsible for helping the design team balance the game.

Nope, this is exactly my position as well.

In all the info GW and other youtube folks have been putting out about playtesting and designing 9th edition, I haven't heard much at all about how such and such narrative player was involved in making sure the character of such and such a faction was preserved in 9th ed: Just a bunch of tournament players providing competitive tips n' tricks for how to micro your model placement for your boyz blob, or how to achieve a 7" charge out of deep strike using trigonometry, or how to toe-touch a ruin for true-LOS with your riptide.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Maybe I am more moderate than the OP, but I am not arguing that competitive players shouldn't be involved in helping the design team balance the game. Rather, I am arguing that they shouldn't solely be responsible for helping the design team balance the game.

The issue is that, unlike with a video game, GW has no way of gathering data from anything other than competitive play. Also unlike a video game they have no way to ensure that anybody not at a tournament is being matched against skill appropriate players and is actually playing the game correctly. All of the above makes their job next to impossible already but that's not even the worst hurdle.

Even if they could magically collect all of the above data; that data would also be noisy as hell. Unlike the homogenization that occurs at the top level of competition, there's no standard at all in the lower tiers. One player might have off-meta units that were good 4 editions ago, another player might have a fluffy list that happens to include a few all-star units he thinks are cool, while a third player bought Tau and only uses battle suits because they're anime, the final player of the group bought Orks because he likes shouting WAAAGH! once per game and can't be convinced to do anything but advance and fish for 12" charges because 'Dat's what da boss would do'. How do you even approach balancing that?

Even a game like League of Legends can see massive win-rate differences simply down to the order in which a champion skills up or which item they purchase first. Let alone any skill expression like map awareness, warding, last hitting, positing in fights, etc. Toss in the sheer variables of 40k and we're lucky it's as functional as it is.

Here's how I'd handle a game between Slaanesh Daemons and Imperial Guard:

Daemons objective: "Feast on Fear:" Every failed morale check caused by an action taken by a unit in your army gives you {X} victory points. If you exceed {y} victory points, you win!

Imperial Guard objective: "Hold the Line:" Place two objectives in your own deployment zone. Each one is worth {Z} VP to you. If you match or exceed {2Z} VP, you win!

In this case, it actually makes for a game where two winners (and two losers!) is possible - which is indeed narratively possible. It is entirely conceivable that both sides complete their objective and acquire a victory in a narrative sense, especially if their objectives are so mismatched.

the_scotsman wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Maybe I am more moderate than the OP, but I am not arguing that competitive players shouldn't be involved in helping the design team balance the game. Rather, I am arguing that they shouldn't solely be responsible for helping the design team balance the game.

Nope, this is exactly my position as well.

In all the info GW and other youtube folks have been putting out about playtesting and designing 9th edition, I haven't heard much at all about how such and such narrative player was involved in making sure the character of such and such a faction was preserved in 9th ed: Just a bunch of tournament players providing competitive tips n' tricks for how to micro your model placement for your boyz blob, or how to achieve a 7" charge out of deep strike using trigonometry, or how to toe-touch a ruin for true-LOS with your riptide.

Soooooo how does a narrative player help?

 Canadian 5th wrote:
The issue is that, unlike with a video game, GW has no way of gathering data from anything other than competitive play.

Data/metrics are 99% worthless for rectifying the issues OP is talking about. Collecting data is great for determining competitive balance (eg is there a weapon/character/unit/etc that the data shows rarely gets used, or is used all the time?), but whether the game feels right is not something you can glean from data.

The answer there is the same as the answer here: Use casual playtesters to provide qualitative, not quantitative, feedback. Usability/UX testing observation procedures are especially helpful if you have the resources to do testing in-house, but even just soliciting feedback from a greater community is helpful.

This is not a unique problem to GW and it's not one that's gone forever unsolved.

Pft, the objectives and stuff or for the umie gitz. Orkzes got their own game every game; Get into da fight.

If at the end of the game the umie is worried about some fiddly victory points, just remember, you had a WAAAGH! there was lots of fightin' and it was orky.

Stop playing the umies competitive game, you can have all the fluffy fun you want and celebrate your own fluffy victory, even if it doesn't add up to more victory points.

The very idea that orkz would camp a thing unless they knew it would bring them a good fight is heresy.

 Canadian 5th wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Maybe I am more moderate than the OP, but I am not arguing that competitive players shouldn't be involved in helping the design team balance the game. Rather, I am arguing that they shouldn't solely be responsible for helping the design team balance the game.

The issue is that, unlike with a video game, GW has no way of gathering data from anything other than competitive play. Also unlike a video game they have no way to ensure that anybody not at a tournament is being matched against skill appropriate players and is actually playing the game correctly. All of the above makes their job next to impossible already but that's not even the worst hurdle.

Even if they could magically collect all of the above data; that data would also be noisy as hell. Unlike the homogenization that occurs at the top level of competition, there's no standard at all in the lower tiers. One player might have off-meta units that were good 4 editions ago, another player might have a fluffy list that happens to include a few all-star units he thinks are cool, while a third player bought Tau and only uses battle suits because they're anime, the final player of the group bought Orks because he likes shouting WAAAGH! once per game and can't be convinced to do anything but advance and fish for 12" charges because 'Dat's what da boss would do'. How do you even approach balancing that?

Even a game like League of Legends can see massive win-rate differences simply down to the order in which a champion skills up or which item they purchase first. Let alone any skill expression like map awareness, warding, last hitting, positing in fights, etc. Toss in the sheer variables of 40k and we're lucky it's as functional as it is.

That's only because you're looking at it quantitatively. If they handed their playtesters a paragraph of lore about how they expect the battle to go, then the players play the battle, and part of the output is "how close did the gameplay match that paragraph we wrote? What were the major divergences?"

For example, if the paragraph said "We expect the Orks to go forwards and fight a line of guardsmen, huge chunks being blown out of their units, but ultimately to overwhelm the front line of IG and require an appropriate Imperial counterattack to hold" then the playtesters would say "no, turtling under a KFF in the middle of the board and enduring losses until you run out of turns did not match that."

Essentially, you include casual/narrative qualitative concerns as part of your playtest - and you include the relevant players as well, perhaps.

Oh look, a deathwatch preview article.

oh look, it's from a tournament player who says that things are looking great for the "mainstay weapon" of the deathwatch: The storm bolter.

A gun that you'll notice does not appear in the Deathwatch Kill Team kit anywhere, and that pretty much only exists in tournament competitive deathwatch lists, where the flexible, versatile anti-xenos specialists bring 100% identical squads of dudes, all equipped with storm bolters and storm shields, marching like the faceless legion of identical soldiers the deathwatch has always been meant to be!

This is the point of the OP. This is the guy they asked to playtest the Deatwatch and make sure they work like they should in the new edition: The dude that took the rules for a unit intended to be like regular marines, but more flexible, and used it to make them be like marines, but more uniform and identical.

"Say, joe, how do the deathwatch play in the new edition?"

"Great, I really love the fact that my 10-man storm bolter/storm shield squads get 2+ 4++ now!"

"cool, did you try any of the Deathwatch weapons?"

"Deathwatch weapons? You mean the storm bolter?"

"No, the...like the weapons from the kit. The power swords, and the heavy thunder hammer, and the deathwatch shotgun, and the infernus heavy bolter?"

"The what? Sorry, I ebayed my squads with AOBR bodies and storm bolter/storm shield arms from a bitz reseller, then had them shipped directly to the commission painter to build them for an extra charge before he 3-color sprayed them. What comes in the kit?"

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
If you don't see how "sit in my DZ behind a defensive line and never move" can be a tense situation, then you should watch Zulu, which is literally a film full of suspense with some pretty damn good battle scenes. It consists of guys sitting largely stationary behind a defensive line.

Except that was tense, because it was a couple hundred rundown troops versus thousands.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
If you don't see how "sit in my DZ behind a defensive line and never move" can be a tense situation, then you should watch Zulu, which is literally a film full of suspense with some pretty damn good battle scenes. It consists of guys sitting largely stationary behind a defensive line.

Except that was tense, because it was a couple hundred rundown troops versus thousands.

You can't imagine a situation when it is tense because it's a couple-hundred well-equipped troops against fifty or so much much better troops? The point is that it is possible to have an entertaining and engaging battle where one side sits behind a defensive line the whole time. "how to accomplish that specifically" is GW's problem, not mine. But if someone wants to pay me for my time at about the same rate as a GW designer I could perhaps give some proposals.

OP, you're spot on.

Unfortunately a lot of people simply do not get this. It was clearly demonstrated in a recent Eldar thread, where the Eldar players complained about the rules of their army not reflecting the fluff or supporting the thematic playstyle, only to be met with several people telling them that their complaints were stupid because the Eldar do well in tournaments.

Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate. Granted, ideally you would do all three.

 catbarf wrote:
Data/metrics are 99% worthless for rectifying the issues OP is talking about. Collecting data is great for determining competitive balance (eg is there a weapon/character/unit/etc that the data shows rarely gets used, or is used all the time?), but whether the game feels right is not something you can glean from data.

The answer there is the same as the answer here: Use casual playtesters to provide qualitative, not quantitative, feedback. Usability/UX testing observation procedures are especially helpful if you have the resources to do testing in-house, but even just soliciting feedback from a greater community is helpful.

This is not a unique problem to GW and it's not one that's gone forever unsolved.

But its just a circle though.
"I think the best way to build an Ork list is to take all the Boyz and yolo forward all the time."
"O...kay. I guess we can try and build the game so that has the best chance of winning."
"Yeah but, I think the best way to build an Ork list is to not have loads of boys, and instead have lots of buggies, or dredds"
"Okay I guess we should also try and make that list have the best chance of winning...."
"Yeah okay but I play Blood Axes, and I think the best way to play Orks is to be ded Kunnin' and use taktiks and stuff."
".... just screw it. This is impossible."

In MTG terms what we seem to be asking for is that every list simultaneously satisfies Timmy, Johnny and Spike players. But this is impossible.

If all the Timmy and Johnny players were upset with 9th I could understand - but where is the evidence of that? If you fundamentally don't care about winning for the sake of winning - and are happy to trade that in to win "the right way" - balance is much less of a concern.

Cant be any balancing since datasheets and army rules are unbalanced (hint : toward marines).

Rules tweaking is a smoke screen to hide the fact that whatever core rules are implemented, marines get the best weapons, and the best bodies (for the points) to carry them.

It keeps players hoping, and buying, and new players are lured in with a starctaft-like balancing PR.

Tyel wrote:
If all the Timmy and Johnny players were upset with 9th I could understand - but where is the evidence of that? If you fundamentally don't care about winning for the sake of winning - and are happy to trade that in to win "the right way" - balance is much less of a concern.

You're in a thread where Timmies and Johnnies are complaining about ninth, and asking for evidence that Timmies and Johnnies are upset with 9th? Really?

And no, balance isn't less of a concern. I don't want less balanced games. I think balanced games are great, because it leads to tense and engaging outcomes. I just think they have to be balanced and support lore-friendly army construction and employment at the same time.

Imagine if a World War 2 game played this way:
"I bought into Soviets to play horde infantry, tank riders, and fairly good tanks."
"Oh, sorry, the way the Soviets actually play is you just take a bunch of Special Forces guys using captured German equipment and infiltrate onto the objectives, stacking [x combo of rules] to make all your enemies fail detection rolls until you win."
"Ah... I ... I see. Alright. Well at least the game is balanced because the Germans can just use Panzer II blobs in late-war against the American trash infantry horde."
"BALANCE!"

Tyel wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
Data/metrics are 99% worthless for rectifying the issues OP is talking about. Collecting data is great for determining competitive balance (eg is there a weapon/character/unit/etc that the data shows rarely gets used, or is used all the time?), but whether the game feels right is not something you can glean from data.

The answer there is the same as the answer here: Use casual playtesters to provide qualitative, not quantitative, feedback. Usability/UX testing observation procedures are especially helpful if you have the resources to do testing in-house, but even just soliciting feedback from a greater community is helpful.

This is not a unique problem to GW and it's not one that's gone forever unsolved.

But its just a circle though.
"I think the best way to build an Ork list is to take all the Boyz and yolo forward all the time."
"O...kay. I guess we can try and build the game so that has the best chance of winning."
"Yeah but, I think the best way to build an Ork list is to not have loads of boys, and instead have lots of buggies, or dredds"
"Okay I guess we should also try and make that list have the best chance of winning...."
"Yeah okay but I play Blood Axes, and I think the best way to play Orks is to be ded Kunnin' and use taktiks and stuff."
".... just screw it. This is impossible."

In MTG terms what we seem to be asking for is that every list simultaneously satisfies Timmy, Johnny and Spike players. But this is impossible.

If all the Timmy and Johnny players were upset with 9th I could understand - but where is the evidence of that? If you fundamentally don't care about winning for the sake of winning - and are happy to trade that in to win "the right way" - balance is much less of a concern.

I don't know, every group I've seen putting out preview content, writing articles or talking about their experiences playtesting the game is Spike.

Except for Winters SEO, whom I consider a casual/narrative gamer and love his videos. And do you know what his latest is called?

RANT! Narrative play. The Crusade system...and why it is bad

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

Tyel wrote:
If all the Timmy and Johnny players were upset with 9th I could understand - but where is the evidence of that? If you fundamentally don't care about winning for the sake of winning - and are happy to trade that in to win "the right way" - balance is much less of a concern.

You're in a thread where Timmies and Johnnies are complaining about ninth, and asking for evidence that Timmies and Johnnies are upset with 9th? Really?

And no, balance isn't less of a concern. I don't want less balanced games. I think balanced games are great, because it leads to tense and engaging outcomes. I just think they have to be balanced and support lore-friendly army construction and employment at the same time.

Imagine if a World War 2 game played this way:
"I bought into Soviets to play horde infantry, tank riders, and fairly good tanks."
"Oh, sorry, the way the Soviets actually play is you just take a bunch of Special Forces guys using captured German equipment and infiltrate onto the objectives, stacking [x combo of rules] to make all your enemies fail detection rolls until you win."
"Ah... I ... I see. Alright. Well at least the game is balanced because the Germans can just use Panzer II hordes in late-war against the American trash infantry horde."
"BALANCE!"

This reminds me of a Roman game I played at a Con last year that had infantry that moved 12", cavalry that moved 18", and bowmen with 2" range. and all combat was based on number of models, so elephants were the weakest units. Gave me a chuckle remembering it.

the_scotsman wrote:
This reminds me of a Roman game I played at a Con last year that had infantry that moved 12", cavalry that moved 18", and bowmen with 2" range. and all combat was based on number of models, so elephants were the weakest units. Gave me a chuckle remembering it.

As long as it was finely balanced, who cares, amirite?

the_scotsman wrote:
I don't know, every group I've seen putting out preview content, writing articles or talking about their experiences playtesting the game is Spike.

Well yeah, because if you balance a game competitively, you can always play it casually.

Which I realise is the fundamental conclusion you are trying to destroy - but I don't get it, because of the last sentence. Nothing stops you toning down.

But if you have factions that fundamentally don't work at all, that have no way of playing, then those players are screwed.

I just can't get "I want to play Slaanesh Daemons. I want to just run across the table and stab stuff and that's it. But it turns out I'm more likely to win by holding objectives. Which sucks, bad game, bad game."