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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!

let's address what you said in regard to what I wrote.

1. OK, so whirlwinds and TFC (which getting massive points hikes). Missile launchers, frag grenades...scary stuff! Not really a big deal really.
2. Not happening, unless taking the executioner fellow....which old marines don't get (which was my point)
3. No, just keep your guys together instead of spreading them out to cover masses of the board. It's actually easy.
4. 2 ranks is more than enough to kill most old marine squads.
5. Your shooting will not be affected that much.
6. Strategic reserves are a thing, and maybe it's time to dust off those trukks, etc.

Your point is made vs Primaris top of the pile units and a few other skews, but again, with a narrative game with a marine player...you can have a good game.

the_scotsman wrote:


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

Narrator: It was not, in fact, perfect 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!

Not really.

It is a healthier game state than if one faction lacked even the specific combos. It is not as healthy a game state as it would be if both factions had the "Good" faction's benefits. Game mechanics requiring gimmick builds are not, as it happens, particularly healthy for Meta purposes, really.

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!

Not really.

It could be, if neither army is FORCED into that position, but rather that it is one of many viable tactical choices presented. If it's the only viable tactical choice presented, it isn't particularly healthy, really.

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!

Not really.

It could be, if that faction isn't FORCED into that position, but rather that it is one of many viable tactical choices presented. If it's the only viable tactical choice presented, it isn't particularly healthy, really.

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!

Not really.

A Meta is healthiest when dominant forces are sufficiently different (with sufficiently different weaknesses and vulnerabilities) that it allows broad varieties of strategies to be used, allowing a continual churning and adaptation. The second list doesn't qualify nearly as well as the first in that regard, so it isn't exactly as healthy - it's less healthy.

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!

Oh, goodness, you might actually have a point here, if points weren't supposed to be a measure of EFFECTIVENESS IN GAME. If 50 light infantry are not worth their points when a superheavy walker is, then they haven't followed the most basic, primal, DO NOT VIOLATE EVERY YOU FOOLS rule of "balancing around competitive play" - that the points are actually BALANCED.




Now, some of these are certainly issues with poorly done competitive play balancing... but they also don't fall prey to the parade of horrors that poorly done balancing around narrative play can inflict upon us (and it has). Hyperbole doesn't help your point.

I'm not unsympathetic to the whole issue, because Orks should be designed to be effective at what they're known for in fluff (aggressive area control through sheer bodies), and there aren't as many viable builds for that as there should be. That's not a hallmark of Competitive Design, that's an unfortunate slip through the cracks.

But your whole argument is essentially a straw man - Competitive Play is at its best when there's INTERNAL balance (between the tools for each faction) and EXTERNAL balance (between the factions), and you're cherry-picking things that Competitive Play would desribe as "kinda gakky balance" at best to use as examples of what Competitive Play designs for.

 Crimson wrote:
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.

he is not 100% correct though, and I was one of the people on that Eldar thread defending the fluff.

I also have a lot of deathwatch that aren't SB/SS. They are great in narrative games, and will continue to be, even with a design shift for 9th.

The only thing that bothered me was the "table is smaller, so SB is better statement". That's cool, but it's a minimum, right....that's what I keep being told. So why is that such a boon for deathwatch in a regular game on a 6x4?

 bullyboy wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
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.

he is not 100% correct though, and I was one of the people on that Eldar thread defending the fluff.

I also have a lot of deathwatch that aren't SB/SS. They are great in narrative games, and will continue to be, even with a design shift for 9th.

The only thing that bothered me was the "table is smaller, so SB is better statement". That's cool, but it's a minimum, right....that's what I keep being told. So why is that such a boon for deathwatch in a regular game on a 6x4?

Oh I'm sorry, are you saying that you're hoping that GW isn't going to be forcing some marketing-based change on the entire playerbase by shoving it through competitive play?

Because thaaaaaaaaaaaats what they're dooooooooooooooooing..... Enjoy your smaller board, it's the new tournament standard.

Tyel wrote:
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."

But why not? As a Slaanesh Daemons player, I picked the faction for its models and lore (though way back when I was planning to use 3rd party models). The Lore for Slaanesh Daemons includes the following:
1) Not holding objectives. Daemons fade back into the warp after a short time in reality, so narratively, "holding" anything is fairly dumb for them.
2) Chasing emotion and excess. They exist partly to excite certain emotions in themselves and the foe, and this process usually involves running up to them and stabbing them - or seducing them. In brief.
3) Doing Slaanesh's will. The other part of their existence is as extensions of their Deity, who is a fickle and oft-dreaming god ill-concerned with military logic such as seizing specific terrain or accomplishing tactical or strategic objectives.

They're an army driven literally by emotion, and not logic. Victory for them should be some sort of emotional high, not having seized some certain amount of the battlefield or killed some certain specific targets or whatever.

Again, to draw another analogy:
This is like picking up a World War II game to play American Paratroopers because you liked watching "Band of Brothers" and finding out that the real way to play paratroopers is to give them zero upgrades, regiment them, don't use their unique deployment rules, and horde them up so you can do human wave attacks like Pickett's Charge.

 Crimson wrote:
Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate.

That's a slightly odd comment. If you don't care about your win rate then what stops you from playing a fluff appropriate playstyle and having fun?

And it also circles back to the idea that asking competitive players to balance the game doesn't include some concept of 'target playstyle'. I mean it's GW, so it might not, but if I was looking to get a game to market my approach with testers would start with 'this is how it is supposed to work...'

A.T. wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate.

That's a slightly odd comment. If you don't care about your win rate then what stops you from playing a fluff appropriate playstyle and having fun?

And it also circles back to the idea that asking competitive players to balance the game doesn't include some concept of 'target playstyle'. I mean it's GW, so it might not, but if I was looking to get a game to market my approach with testers would start with 'this is how it is supposed to work...'

Look back at my example from the narrative campaign. I could either lose every game and play narratively, but lose the campaign (because my specific army's narrative is incompatible with the mission victory conditions) and therefore narratively lose the whole campaign, which is painful for my army's fluff and is guaranteed. Or I can win enough of my games and then win the campaign, but have played my army in the most penny-pinching, un-narrative way possible within the tactical engagements.

A game should both be balanced and supporting the narrative.

the_scotsman wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
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.

he is not 100% correct though, and I was one of the people on that Eldar thread defending the fluff.

I also have a lot of deathwatch that aren't SB/SS. They are great in narrative games, and will continue to be, even with a design shift for 9th.

The only thing that bothered me was the "table is smaller, so SB is better statement". That's cool, but it's a minimum, right....that's what I keep being told. So why is that such a boon for deathwatch in a regular game on a 6x4?

Oh I'm sorry, are you saying that you're hoping that GW isn't going to be forcing some marketing-based change on the entire playerbase by shoving it through competitive play?

Because thaaaaaaaaaaaats what they're dooooooooooooooooing..... Enjoy your smaller board, it's the new tournament standard.

lol, no. I thought we were talking narrative games here......where I will enjoy my 6x4 board. Please decide what you are arguing for here?

A.T. wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate.

That's a slightly odd comment. If you don't care about your win rate then what stops you from playing a fluff appropriate playstyle and having fun?

And it also circles back to the idea that asking competitive players to balance the game doesn't include some concept of 'target playstyle'. I mean it's GW, so it might not, but if I was looking to get a game to market my approach with testers would start with 'this is how it is supposed to work...'

Maybe you care more about your win-rate playing the models you own/a fluffy list than the absolute overall winrate of people playing top-level tournaments with bizarre amalgamations of the top three units in three different Codexes and claiming they're playing your army.

Tyel wrote:
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.

You misunderstand- the idea is not to take a poll of every casual player and ensure that all of their strategies are equally viable. The idea is to have a coherent vision for how the game should play, and test the design against that vision.

Let's use a historical analogy: We're going to make a game about D-Day. What should happen is that the Allied player will hit the beach ASAP, take heavy losses, but push through and achieve a breakout. That's their win condition.

So we go and spend a bunch of time writing up our ruleset, and then give it to some hardcore competitive players to try out. And they come back to us and tell us that the game has a 50/50 winrate- it's perfectly balanced. Great! We release it and it's immediately a dismal failure.

Because it turns out that the optimal strategy that these competitive players developed, and the one that results in the 50/50 winrate, is for the Allies to avoid landing as long as possible. They sit in their boats out at the edge of the board and let naval gunfire do the work, and once that's done, land and proceed through- if the artillery is enough then the Allies win, if it doesn't wipe out the defenders then the Allies lose. Attempting to take the beach under fire, as actually happened, is suicide and doesn't work. So we've developed a game with a competitively balanced 50/50 winrate, but when played by a historically-minded player always results in a loss for the Allies and isn't particularly fun either.

Do you see the problem? We tested whether the game was objectively balanced, but we didn't test whether the optimal play strategy matched history. We now have an incongruence where the winning strategy of the game is different from the winning strategy in history, and in historical wargaming that is straight-up bad design.

In a modern wargame, we have the same expectations. The strategies that work in a modern, fictional-setting wargame should be the ones that work in real life. If the best way to employ infantry is in a Napoleonic line marching abreast into machine gun fire, it may be balanced in a competitive sense, but our game design is fundamentally flawed.

In a fantasy or sci-fi wargame, we don't have an objective reference, but presumably we do have a coherent vision for what our fictional battlefield looks like and how it works. The game should be designed to facilitate that vision.

So, back to 40K: It may be competitively balanced for the primary value of an Ork Boy to be in sitting on objectives, hiding from a fight, and absorbing bullets. But that doesn't match the game's fluff at all; and if that's the optimal way to employ Boyz, then a casual player who uses them aggressively will be employing them suboptimally, and it will not be balanced for that casual context.

The solution is not to pick a side and balance around either competitive play or casual play. The solution is to perform qualitative playtesting analysis, determine that the optimal strategy doesn't match the fluff or what's fun to play, and then redesign the game to rectify the imbalance. An Ork player who hides his Boyz should be punished. An Ork player who uses his Boyz aggressively should be rewarded. Once the game mechanics are set up to incentivize the 'correct' behavior, then there is no longer an incongruence between competitive and casual players: They will both be using Boyz the same way. Competitive players will do it because the game rewards them for it, casual players will do it because that's what the fluff says and what feels right, and thus Boyz can be balanced for both players.

Should Blood Axes behave differently? Okay, now let's assess how they should play versus how the new redesign encourages them to play, and adjust accordingly. Maybe we want them to still be aggressive, but be a bit smarter about it, so let's give them more benefit from cover while still having incentives to get into combat and disincentives to avoiding a fight. Now let's get that in front of casual playtesters to see if it feels right to them, and competitive playtesters to see if there are unintended side effects, or if the mechanic doesn't actually encourage the play we want to see. Notice how the playtesting goals are not just 'is this balanced at a tournament level', but we still need competitive playtesters in the mix.

And so this comes back to OP's point: The problem is not using competitive players for playtesting. The problem is assessing the game's design quality solely through the lens of competitive balance, while neglecting soft factors that matter to casual or narrative-driven players. You need a healthy cross-section of playtester demographics and a rigorous approach to testing (there is standard methodology for this- again, this is a solved problem!) to properly playtest and adjust the game as needed. You can't have just Spike players playtesting and driving redesign; you need Timmy and Johnny players offering their feedback as well, and it is certainly possible to please all three groups if you do your job properly.

 catbarf wrote:
You misunderstand- the idea is not to take a poll of every casual player and ensure that all of their strategies are equally viable. The idea is to have a coherent vision for how the game should play, and test the design against that vision.

Let's use a historical analogy: We're going to make a game about D-Day. What should happen is that the Allied player will hit the beach ASAP, take heavy losses, but push through and achieve a breakout. That's their win condition.

So we go and spend a bunch of time writing up our ruleset, and then give it to some hardcore competitive players to try out. And they come back to us and tell us that the game has a 50/50 winrate- it's perfectly balanced. Great! We release it and it's immediately a dismal failure.

Because it turns out that the optimal strategy that these competitive players developed, and the one that results in the 50/50 winrate, is for the Allies to avoid landing as long as possible. They sit in their boats out at the edge of the board and let naval gunfire do the work, and once that's done, land and proceed through- if the artillery is enough then the Allies win, if it doesn't wipe out the defenders then the Allies lose. Attempting to take the beach under fire, as actually happened, is suicide and doesn't work. So we've developed a game with a competitively balanced 50/50 winrate, but when played by a historically-minded player always results in a loss for the Allies and isn't particularly fun either.

Shouldn't the historically minded player realize that the allies didn't simply zerg rush the beaches and did in fact spend time on a pre-assault bombardment and bombing campaign earlier that morning?

So, back to 40K: It may be competitively balanced for the primary value of an Ork Boy to be in sitting on objectives, hiding from a fight, and absorbing bullets. But that doesn't match the game's fluff at all; and if that's the optimal way to employ Boyz, then a casual player who uses them aggressively will be employing them suboptimally, and it will not be balanced for that casual context.

The solution is not to pick a side and balance around either competitive play or casual play. The solution is to perform qualitative playtesting analysis, determine that the optimal strategy doesn't match the fluff or what's fun to play, and then redesign the game to rectify the imbalance. An Ork player who hides his Boyz should be punished. An Ork player who uses his Boyz aggressively should be rewarded. Once the game mechanics are set up to incentivize the 'correct' behavior, then there is no longer an incongruence between competitive and casual players: They will both be using Boyz the same way. Competitive players will do it because the game rewards them for it, casual players will do it because that's what the fluff says and what feels right, and thus Boyz can be balanced for both players.

If Orks and Daemons are built to use the complex strategy of, checks notes, move forward at full speed until they reach melee then they're going to cream armies based on board control and holding objectives unless those armies have tools to remove entire units of Orks each turn to push back the tide. This is to say nothing of a new player attempting the Eldar hit and run tactics that, in fluff, take thousands of years of dedication to fully master. How do you balance the different skills required to play each style and what do you assume the average skill level is? How do you account for the balance of a high skill player using a high skill cap, but fluffy, army against a low skill cap army and beating them 75% of the time while the same army run by a less skilled player losses 75% of the time against that same list?

There's a reason why League of Legends balances around 4-tiers of play. Average (Casual Players), Medium (Diamond plus), Skilled (Challenger), and Very Skilled (Profesional). That average tier contains 80% of your players, but only 25% of your champions really fit in at that tier and skilled players using champions designed for another tier will feel unfair at lower levels of play until the player is rated fairly and matched against equally skilled players where their win rate settles in at 50/50.

In 40k you don't have the option to match against 10s of thousands of players of equal skill with their champion picks and playstyle carefully measured by a computer designed to give players even and engaging matches. You have a dozen or less players at a local store who each have different budgets and levels of time to dedicate to the game. How do you maintain fluff while also accounting for skill, budget, and local meta?

Well said, Catbarf. I think one thing you mentioned but has been somewhat in doubt of late is the coherent vision of how a battle should play out.

I'm not sure the designers have a "coherent vision" for what they are expecting battles to look like. They don't quite understand the nuanced conflict between, say, a Keeper of Secrets and a squad of Guardsmen, or even between an entire army of Slaanesh Daemons and an entire army of loyalists. In 30k and AOS, they seem to have a better grasp. Keeper of Secrets as an example:

In AOS, Keepers do a lot more than simply "10 attacks at 2+, 2+, -3, 3D." They interact with their opponent in more warpy, slaaneshi ways. Indeed, a keeper in AOS is much less more likely to land huge amounts of damage (though it can spike to much greater amounts!). Instead, the strength of a KOS comes from its ability to seduce and toy with the enemy, doing things such as forcing them to attack last by breaking their will with allure, sensuality and temptation, or offering them a bonus (re-rolls) with the potential of a curse (instant death at the end of the phase on a certain roll). Toying, playing, bating, seducing. They have solid damage output, but you don't take it just for the damage.

In 30k, Keepers don't exist. Instead, the daemons begin roughly the same, and what upgrades and army choices you make affects how your models play. A Greater Daemon of the Lurid Onslaught, the closest thing to a Keeper (and clearly intended to be a keeper, given the name) comes out of a Warp Rift, neither deep striking nor deploying normally, and is a potent and terrifying psyker - though it lacks the sheer power of the Gibbering Madness (Tzeench). It has graceful speed (Fleet and Move Through Cover) but lacks the overwhelming brutality of the Khorne analogue, and has an ability to deceive and seduce enemy squads (reducing their initiative in a fight). Additionally, Armies of the Lurid Onslaught can ignore the mission rolled for and instead select a victory condition that is much more slaaneshi, gaining VP from failed morale checks (feeding on despair and the breaking of wills) and losing VP on heroically passed ones (being rebuffed by heroic will and steadfastness in the face of temptation), for example. Combined with mechanics to increase the number of morale checks taken, this works out to make an army that plays uniquely and isn't shackled by holding hum-drum mortal objectives.

So there are two examples of games with visions to employ Slaanesh. I think the same vision is lacking in 40k, or seems to be.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Canadian 5th wrote:
In 40k you don't have the option to match against 10s of thousands of players of equal skill with their champion picks and playstyle carefully measured by a computer designed to give players even and engaging matches. You have a dozen or less players at a local store who each have different budgets and levels of time to dedicate to the game. How do you maintain fluff while also accounting for skill, budget, and local meta?

You do qualitative analysis during playtesting and include casual and narrative players in the playtest.

As has been mentioned several times before, including in the post you quoted - which even says it's a solved problem in the industry.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Well said, Catbarf. I think one thing you mentioned but has been somewhat in doubt of late is the coherent vision of how a battle should play out.

So what happens if you balance Orks around the idea of them moving as close to the enemy as possible each turn and hitting an enemy gun line, such as guard, with 30% of their forces and that being enough to win 50% of the time and a skilled player uses the terrain to keep 50% of their forces alive and thus steamrolls gunlines? What if another player realizes that Orks can actually win even bigger if they only try for a few Ork objectives with a fraction of their force and use the rest of their army to counter punch the Space Marine force which wins by attempting to hold the center of the table?

You do qualitative analysis during playtesting and include casual and narrative players in the playtest.

As has been mentioned several times before, including in the post you quoted - which even says it's a solved problem in the industry.

How does that help anything once skill expression is factored in? How does that work with an 'intended list' being used in an unintended but powerful way?

Also, provide proof that this is a solved problem within the computer gaming industry. Then show me that it's also solved for the tabletop wargaming industry. You can't just assert that something is solved and not show that this proof is common, works for games of 40k's level of complexity, and can accommodate all skill and budget levels as well as metas based around these disparate levels of resources.

For example, just for guard, you need to balance around Armored Companies, Mechanized Infantry, Massed Infantry, Elite Drop Troops, Fliers and Tanks, and any and all mixes of the above and they need to be balanced so that any of these can play against any of them without the issue of armor skew being a problem against a foot list that has limited heavy weapons teams. Then factor that over every army in the game.

Then factor in that other players may think fluff involves not taking counters to certain units because, "My regiment is anti-horde, they fought in the battle of xxx against the Tyranids and relied on regiment C to provide anti-tank and air cover." and he has to play against, "My regiment is built to support this relic baneblade handed down for centuries."

 auticus wrote:

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?

Not all consists will be equal, because the strategy behind list building matters. A hodgepodge laundry basket of units selected for theme or because it was one the shelf should be an uphill battle against a strategically composed list where each unit was selected for purpose.

 Canadian 5th wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Well said, Catbarf. I think one thing you mentioned but has been somewhat in doubt of late is the coherent vision of how a battle should play out.

So what happens if you balance Orks around the idea of them moving as close to the enemy as possible each turn and hitting an enemy gun line, such as guard, with 30% of their forces and that being enough to win 50% of the time and a skilled player uses the terrain to keep 50% of their forces alive and thus steamrolls gunlines? What if another player realizes that Orks can actually win even bigger if they only try for a few Ork objectives with a fraction of their force and use the rest of their army to counter punch the Space Marine force which wins by attempting to hold the center of the table?

Then you balance the game to achieve better winrates? I said that you should balance the game and have a narrative vision for how the battle should play out - they are not mutually exclusive. And if they are? Then you have the luxury of changing your narrative vision (though I think this would upset many players if orks became... squatters or something who preferred to just sit on objectives and die slowly).

 Canadian 5th wrote:

You do qualitative analysis during playtesting and include casual and narrative players in the playtest.

As has been mentioned several times before, including in the post you quoted - which even says it's a solved problem in the industry.

How does that help anything once skill expression is factored in? How does that work with an 'intended list' being used in an unintended but powerful way?

Skill expression is why you include players of multiple levels in your playtest, and in theory your game design should encourage intended things to work they way they work, and unintended things to not work. That's... why game design is hard. You have to make sure the game functions as intended, and fix it when it doesn't. Obviously.

 Canadian 5th wrote:
Also, provide proof that this is a solved problem within the computer gaming industry. Then show me that it's also solved for the tabletop wargaming industry.

I didn't make the claim and don't have any proof, but feel free to PM Catbarf for his proof. I was just pointing out that the post you quoted claimed it was solved.


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 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
Not all consists will be equal, because the strategy behind list building matters. A hodgepodge laundry basket of units selected for theme or because it was one the shelf should be an uphill battle against a strategically composed list where each unit was selected for purpose.

I agree with you, but the point we are making is that:
"A strategically composed list where each unit was selected for purpose" should coincide very well with "a hodgepodge laundry list basket of units selected for theme" provided that theme is the narrative of the army in question and not something utterly bizarre (like a Fortification-themed list that spams fortifications and Inquisitors or something).

Otherwise, you end up with players who choose an army for the narrative having to play something entirely unrelated. You end up with Band of Brothers fans doing human wave attacks with american paratroopers armed as cheaply as possible. That's obviously bad.

Competitive balance: Is there a combination of units and tactics that will get me a favorable win-rate against the field of armies?

Narrative balance: can I play the units I like, the units that would logically appear in my head-cannon, and a wide variety of units that can stand on their own and function as they should in lore.

These things are not the same. Both camps come from differing mindsets and I doubt the differences could ever be reconcilable. Simply having a build that can win 50%+ of the time against anyone, but relies on a specific combination of factors and is not reproducible outside of those conditions will certainly not make for a good, healthy narrative environment.

No, balancing for competition does not improve the game at the narrative level. They are not at all concerned with the same objectives and outcomes. They're not even concerned with playing the tabletop the same.

Like in an MMO, I always preferred the structured PvP system to have a different set of rules/abilities that applied only in PvP. That way PvP could be balanced separately from everything else. When WoW went on the big PvP normalization a lot of specs/classes lost their way and we ended up with a muddled mess of 31 flavors that all tasted like chicken.

It is why I never complained about ITC or other big gaming competitions having their own set of rules. They could make their own rules for their intended audience and it had 0 impact on what my friends and I were doing. Both groups could have their cakes and eat 'em, too.

Edit: this is why I am super stoked for Crusade. Finally, "narrative" isn't just "matched play only... power level and no structure!". There is a structured play system for narrative that is possibly even more expansive than even Matched Play, right now. I think this is a healthy decision as you can make the cut-throat environment competitors want in Matched Play without stomping over the people that may not necessarily want to play 6 flyrants to have a chance at competing in a game.

 Crimson wrote:
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.

I don't think that was the argument.

I believe it was that Eldar players were expressing feeling abused and others were pointing out several advantages that leads to them taking top tables. Not that the units they want to be better don't deserve to be better.

But that can vary person to person and I can't speak for everyone.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
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.

These sure sound like the kind of secondaries that GW has said will be in the updated codexes. Granted I disagree with the idea of putting them in individual books and think the army-specific secondaries should have been put in the launch Chapter Approved, but it is what it is.

Well, more fluff-related objectives. The specific examples given are actually terrible.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Then you balance the game to achieve better winrates? I said that you should balance the game and have a narrative vision for how the battle should play out - they are not mutually exclusive. And if they are? Then you have the luxury of changing your narrative vision (though I think this would upset many players if orks became... squatters or something who preferred to just sit on objectives and die slowly).

You can't drastically shift 40k's lore at this point. Look at the outrage around Primaris and the fact that there are still players who dislike Tau and the Necron rework.

So your only left with the lever of making gameplay work. How do you make a low skill cap army equal win-rate against a high skill cap army when both of them are being played by casual players who barely remember the rules? How do you make that same battle balanced if both players are season veterans and enjoy the tournament scene?

You can't just say that these things should be balanced, you need to show how they can be done in the face of the issues I've raised.

 Canadian 5th wrote:
Skill expression is why you include players of multiple levels in your playtest, and in theory your game design should encourage intended things to work they way they work, and unintended things to not work. That's... why game design is hard. You have to make sure the game functions as intended, and fix it when it doesn't. Obviously.

Let's again look at League of Legends, they have champions that are enjoyable at low skill levels that are tuned so that they fall off quickly in utility at higher levels of skill. This has to be the case because if those champions were tuned for high skill play they would be oppressive at low level play. Are these champions unbalanced? How about the inverse a champion that requires you to hit a 3 button combo with a tight timing window for maximum effect, they do poorly in the hands of an unskilled player but work at higher skill levels, and fall off again in pro where players can avoid the combo either via skill or team play. Are those champions unbalanced?

 Canadian 5th wrote:
I didn't make the claim and don't have any proof, but feel free to PM Catbarf for his proof. I was just pointing out that the post you quoted claimed it was solved.

Claims without proof are meaningless and you shouldn't lend such claims credence until they are proven.

OP, you seem to be making the argument that narrative and flavor cannot be balanced at all. Why not? Other games do.

I play competitively, whether it's a tournament or not, and it's pretty boring when there are "competitive builds," and then everything else, and when armies and individual units don't represent their fluff, or provide multiple options for building a viable force.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

A.T. wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate.

That's a slightly odd comment. If you don't care about your win rate then what stops you from playing a fluff appropriate playstyle and having fun?

And it also circles back to the idea that asking competitive players to balance the game doesn't include some concept of 'target playstyle'. I mean it's GW, so it might not, but if I was looking to get a game to market my approach with testers would start with 'this is how it is supposed to work...'

Maybe you care more about your win-rate playing the models you own/a fluffy list than the absolute overall winrate of people playing top-level tournaments with bizarre amalgamations of the top three units in three different Codexes and claiming they're playing your army.

Well that's fine - but then you have to support fluff appropriate playstyle and balance the game, it's not an either-or ... well, unless you deliberately make it so that fluff-appropriate lists are disproportionately powerful, but GW tried that in 7th and it was not a good idea.

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

But, as many people have said, sometimes the "competitive" balance on paper doesn't match what "casual" players want to do.

A game probably *should* be balanced competitively, but in addition to being casually balanced. Otherwise, we get cases of, as later posts indicate, things like competitively minded players doing things that don't fit the narrative trying to be told, in favour of optimisation.

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."

Because Slaanesh Daemons aren't well known for their objective holding, and so they shouldn't be penalised for not holding them/incentivised to do things other than camp objectives.

Agreed with both. What is encouraged in the rules of the game is not always the same as what should be encouraged from a narrative perspective, and that's a problem.

It's an issue I've had in 40k for a long time regarding Space Marine Scouts - Scouts should be a supplementary force, not the backbone of the army, and yet I've seen countless Space Marine armies made up almost entirely of Scouts acting as the default infantry unit, as that's what was competitively encouraged. It just feels so *off*.

Oh yeah, counter point: in 8th the Tzeentch/Nurgle buddies bonanza was a strong but well-balanced competitive list.

GW completely changed the detachment system to kill it because it's such a bizarre and unfluffy way to play the game.

 Arachnofiend wrote:
Oh yeah, counter point: in 8th the Tzeentch/Nurgle buddies bonanza was a strong but well-balanced competitive list.

GW completely changed the detachment system to kill it because it's such a bizarre and unfluffy way to play the game.

To be fair, the allies system makes things more difficult to balance and leads to people cherry-picking units that cover their primary force's weaknesses.

 Canadian 5th wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Then you balance the game to achieve better winrates? I said that you should balance the game and have a narrative vision for how the battle should play out - they are not mutually exclusive. And if they are? Then you have the luxury of changing your narrative vision (though I think this would upset many players if orks became... squatters or something who preferred to just sit on objectives and die slowly).

You can't drastically shift 40k's lore at this point. Look at the outrage around Primaris and the fact that there are still players who dislike Tau and the Necron rework.

So your only left with the lever of making gameplay work. How do you make a low skill cap army equal win-rate against a high skill cap army when both of them are being played by casual players who barely remember the rules? How do you make that same battle balanced if both players are season veterans and enjoy the tournament scene?

You can't just say that these things should be balanced, you need to show how they can be done in the face of the issues I've raised.

You don't set an expectation of perfectly even winrates as your main end goal, for starters. You begin by aligning optimal play to theoretical play, with playtesting to confirm. Then you can balance appropriately to the intended matchup; whether you want the game to be fun and approachable for casual play and don't mind it being easily broken at high levels of play (do note that this is how 40K used to be written), or whether you'd prefer the game to be balanced around competitive play and accept that some factions/units/etc will underperform when not handled with high skill.

Additionally, you can cater to multiple skill levels through counteracting mechanics that express at different levels. For instance, in 8th Ed while tri-pointing makes horde infantry more useful at higher levels of play, you can counter it with placement to mitigate tri-pointing. At lower levels of skill players may be unaware of both tri-pointing and the means of mitigating it, so balance is maintained.

I don't think anyone has suggested that a realistic goal is perfect balance for all players with all army compositions at all times, so either you're setting up a strawman or generically dismissing the idea of better playtesting so long as absolute perfection is unattainable; either way it's bunk.

 Canadian 5th wrote:
Let's again look at League of Legends, they have champions that are enjoyable at low skill levels that are tuned so that they fall off quickly in utility at higher levels of skill. This has to be the case because if those champions were tuned for high skill play they would be oppressive at low level play. Are these champions unbalanced? How about the inverse a champion that requires you to hit a 3 button combo with a tight timing window for maximum effect, they do poorly in the hands of an unskilled player but work at higher skill levels, and fall off again in pro where players can avoid the combo either via skill or team play. Are those champions unbalanced?

Unbalanced, no.

Suboptimal, yes.

Acceptable within the constraints of a development team that has other priorities, sure.

 Canadian 5th wrote:
Claims without proof are meaningless and you shouldn't lend such claims credence until they are proven.

Feel free to actually believe that the tabletop gaming and videogaming industries have just no idea how to playtest their products, and that 40K is a weird outlier among a sea of games that have (apparently magically) achieved convergence between optimal and narrative play, if that's what you so desire.

I have a degree in game design and worked in the industry. Nielsen-Norman UX testing procedures (one of the most basic principles of which is use a cross-section of representative users) as applied to gaming are standard practice. Do a Google search for how Valve uses focus groups if you want some insight into a good example of user-focused game design, if you want. I really don't care, because I'm not using claims of authority in lieu of argument.


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Purifying Tempest wrote:
Competitive balance: Is there a combination of units and tactics that will get me a favorable win-rate against the field of armies?

Narrative balance: can I play the units I like, the units that would logically appear in my head-cannon, and a wide variety of units that can stand on their own and function as they should in lore.

These things are not the same. Both camps come from differing mindsets and I doubt the differences could ever be reconcilable.

If you do a good job at game design, then the army composition and tactics used by competitive players because they're most optimal will be indistinguishable from the army composition and tactics used by casual players because they fit the lore.

If they don't look anything alike, and the differences aren't reconcilable, then you've screwed up.

Like, nobody just accepts this as a given in historical wargaming- if the optimal play strategy in a WW2 game is to use forces and tactics that bear no resemblance to anything that actually happened in WW2, you don't chalk it up as an inevitable consequence of the rift between competitive and narrative players; you blame the designers for writing a game where real-world forces and tactics don't work.

 catbarf wrote:
At lower levels of skill players may be unaware of both tri-pointing and the means of mitigating it, so balance is maintained.

The presumption of balance is maintained, but then 90% of that segment will never visit these forums and as such will never complain.

 Canadian 5th wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Then you balance the game to achieve better winrates? I said that you should balance the game and have a narrative vision for how the battle should play out - they are not mutually exclusive. And if they are? Then you have the luxury of changing your narrative vision (though I think this would upset many players if orks became... squatters or something who preferred to just sit on objectives and die slowly).

You can't drastically shift 40k's lore at this point. Look at the outrage around Primaris and the fact that there are still players who dislike Tau and the Necron rework.

So your only left with the lever of making gameplay work. How do you make a low skill cap army equal win-rate against a high skill cap army when both of them are being played by casual players who barely remember the rules? How do you make that same battle balanced if both players are season veterans and enjoy the tournament scene?

You can't just say that these things should be balanced, you need to show how they can be done in the face of the issues I've raised.

Why? That's the game designer's job, not mine. If they can't be balanced, then something has to give - and since 40k's lore is its strongest suit, maybe balance should be what gives. Or maybe it's do-able with a redesign of the rule-set. IMHO the rules are infinitely flexible -there's tons of game designs out there; heck, even with regards to turn structure there's like four separate ways I can think of alone, and that's just the turn structure. (If you're wondering, those turn structures are IGOUGO, Alternating Activations, Alternating Phases, Impulse Model, WEGO. Oops, guess there's five, even better and even more flexible).

 Canadian 5th wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Skill expression is why you include players of multiple levels in your playtest, and in theory your game design should encourage intended things to work they way they work, and unintended things to not work. That's... why game design is hard. You have to make sure the game functions as intended, and fix it when it doesn't. Obviously.

Let's again look at League of Legends, they have champions that are enjoyable at low skill levels that are tuned so that they fall off quickly in utility at higher levels of skill. This has to be the case because if those champions were tuned for high skill play they would be oppressive at low level play. Are these champions unbalanced? How about the inverse a champion that requires you to hit a 3 button combo with a tight timing window for maximum effect, they do poorly in the hands of an unskilled player but work at higher skill levels, and fall off again in pro where players can avoid the combo either via skill or team play. Are those champions unbalanced?

I don't play League of Legends, but one of the crucial things to understand is that you're only talking about tweaking champions. I'm talking about tweaking the whole game. If a champion is oppressive in League of Legends but the same mechanic isn't as oppressive in Overwatch, then maybe you should make your League operate a little bit more like Overwatch (e.g. making it first-person or whatever). Sometimes you have to rethink the underlying structure and core rules of the game to resolve these mechanics, rather than just adjusting codexes or points here and there. Remember, EVERYTHING about the game is human-created, and thus subject to change.

 Canadian 5th wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I didn't make the claim and don't have any proof, but feel free to PM Catbarf for his proof. I was just pointing out that the post you quoted claimed it was solved.

Claims without proof are meaningless and you shouldn't lend such claims credence until they are proven.

Sure.

I think it's reasonable to want your orcs to feel like they have an inherent sense of momentum rushing up the battlefield, that's great game design and I hope that any codex rules that are laid out encourage that style of game play. That said the criticism of counter intuitive playstyles being rewarding in 9th is perhaps a reflection not of army balance but the game system itself. I'm not sure any edition has incentivised killing less than 9th. It looks to be an objective focused game that rewards playing the mission as opposed to a traditionally green skinned slug fest.

That said I'd hope this does lead to a more conventionally balanced game. Your orcs might not be able to charge headlong into Admech/Marine gunlines turn one but they can make use of large numbers of units swarming objectives and choking out the map, coming in from board edges and playing to your strengths. I admit that that's a display of more "cunnin" than some orc players might prefer, but this means you don't have to fight your opponent on his terms and should hopefully make things more competitive. It's not like the orcs to pick a fair fight anyway, so I'd imagine dropping 6 x 10 boys in turn three will still be pretty fun for a lot of players.

 Barbachop wrote:
I think it's reasonable to want your orcs to feel like they have an inherent sense of momentum rushing up the battlefield, that's great game design and I hope that any codex rules that are laid out encourage that style of game play. That said the criticism of counter intuitive playstyles being rewarding in 9th is perhaps a reflection not of army balance but the game system itself. I'm not sure any edition has incentivised killing less than 9th. It looks to be an objective focused game that rewards playing the mission as opposed to a traditionally green skinned slug fest.

That said I'd hope this does lead to a more conventionally balanced game. Your orcs might not be able to charge headlong into Admech/Marine gunlines turn one but they can make use of large numbers of units swarming objectives and choking out the map, coming in from board edges and playing to your strengths. I admit that that's a display of more "cunnin" than some orc players might prefer, but this means you don't have to fight your opponent on his terms and should hopefully make things more competitive. It's not like the orcs to pick a fair fight anyway, so I'd imagine dropping 6 x 10 boys in turn three will still be pretty fun for a lot of players.

The post is intended entirely to be a criticism of counter intuitive playstyles being rewarding in 9th.

Weird, arbitrary breakpoints have ALWAYS created stupid, stupid situations in the rules of 40k.

An autocannon dealing 1/6 wounds to a character and allowed their full 3+ armor save while a krak missile with 1 more strength and AP just OBLITERATED them outright was stupid in 5th.

A 300 point unit getting the "superheavy" designation and gaining stomp, Strength D, immunity to the damage table, and a half-dozen other rules enabling a single wraithknight to be able to easily defeat 3 280-ish point Gorkanauts was stupid in 7th.

A 9-wound gigantic winged daemon being totally safe behind a line of cultists while a 10-wound character could be instantly picked out was stupid in 8th.

And now, for some bizzare, unexplained reason, the second your squad hits that magical number of 6, you take a MASSIVE hit to your effectiveness where you suddenly can't screen, can't wrap, can't string out, and tank min 3 hits from blast weapons.

Why? Why when there are so many damn kits out there that sell 3 models, basically any elite unit in existence, why would you suddenly make it a gigantic trap to take two boxes of space marine bikes or 2 boxes of killa kanz or two boxes of the new admech cavalry and run them as a single unit?

the_scotsman wrote:

And now, for some bizzare, unexplained reason, the second your squad hits that magical number of 6, you take a MASSIVE hit to your effectiveness where you suddenly can't screen, can't wrap, can't string out, and tank min 3 hits from blast weapons.

Why? Why when there are so many damn kits out there that sell 3 models, basically any elite unit in existence, why would you suddenly make it a gigantic trap to take two boxes of space marine bikes or 2 boxes of killa kanz or two boxes of the new admech cavalry and run them as a single unit?

It might be because it isn't that huge of an issue. Dunno.
It certainly isn't as huge as "can't".