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a_typical_hero wrote:
In discussions about balance it usually goes like this:

-> Something is unbalanced
-> You won't achieve perfect balance
-> We don't want perfect balance, we wan't good enough balance.

On average 7.9% points away from a 50/50 chance. Since 50/50 is not realistic, how far away from it is okay?

Not 8%.

I disagree with your premise that 50/50 is an unrealistic goal for the variable of "who went first." I think you could apply some pretty simple compensating factors to the second player in order to close that gap quite a bit.

Some ideas:

1) Second player gets to score Primary points on the first turn.

2) Second player's Command Phase is at the end of their turn, rather than the beginning.

3) Second player's units all add +1 to their saving throw rolls during the first turn for "dug in positions"

Good ideas. Personally for me what felt the most out of place is the 2nd players 5th turn.

Depending on chosen secondaries, you may as well not play that turn out at all. Feels weird that this got greenlit during development without some form of compensation.

a_typical_hero wrote:
In discussions about balance it usually goes like this:

-> Something is unbalanced
-> You won't achieve perfect balance
-> We don't want perfect balance, we wan't good enough balance.

On average 7.9% points away from a 50/50 chance. Since 50/50 is not realistic, how far away from it is okay?

I think the issue is that that's the imbalance just from the basic mission structure.

We haven't factored in any of the other imbalances 40k is rife with.

For example, how do you think that ratio changes when it's an Ultramarine army going first against a CSG army?

How did GW playtest 9th?

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

a_typical_hero wrote:
From what Goonhammer gathered for information so far going first averages out to a winrate of 57.9%.

Which is not insignificant, but far away from "Who goes first wins".


Source: https://www.goonhammer.com/go-first-and-prosper-looking-at-the-9th-edition-meta/

Damn near a 60/40 split isn't that bad? Holy gak. People really are ready to accept crap if it is shoveled by GW.

Because it isn't *simple*. Of those games what was scored for primary/secondary?

What about missions?



I can notice some potential factors about these already. Missions with hammerhead or where you don't need units on objectives to score tend to lessen the divide where missions with Dawn of War deployment or fewer objectives tend to skew more towards first turn.

Why? Is it because deeper deployments allow for more terrain for protection?

11 - score on 1/2; 6 objectives; hammerhead
13 - score on 2/3; 6 objectives; corners; don't need to keep models on for control
23 - score on 2/3; 5 objectives; squished hammerhead
32 - score on 1/2; 5 objectives; quarters; don't need to keep models on for control

12 - score on 1/2; 6 objectives; dawn of war; can raze objectives
21 - score on 1/2; 6 objectives; dawn of war
22 - score on 1/2; 4 objectives; hammerhead
31 - score on 2/3; 6 objectives; dawn of war
33 - score on 1/2; 5 objectives; corners; can move objectives

And look how marines just dominate simply because they're marines and for no other reason!™

 -Ekko- wrote:
How did GW playtest 9th?

By claiming that they had playtested it and expecting their playerbase to just take their word for it, despite all evidence to the contrary.

 Amishprn86 wrote:

Here is a pic to demostrate how bad the terrain was. When you can 100% clearly see 3 objectives in a row and other objectives just from 1 spot, that is bad.

Well, that is absurd. That drives home more the skew towards more room to deploy to take advantage of what terrain is available.

 vipoid wrote:

 -Ekko- wrote:
How did GW playtest 9th?

By claiming that they had playtested it and expecting their playerbase to just take their word for it, despite all evidence to the contrary.

So they really didn't? I read somewhere here on Dakka (i don't remember which thread) that they asked some tourney guys to do it.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

And look how marines just dominate simply because they're marines and for no other reason!™

This is the attitude I disagree with here. We know that a huge percentage of the people who tend to perform best in tournaments switch their subfaction and their faction based on what is most powerful at the time. of COURSE if you look at ANY FACTION and remove the top 1-2 best performing subfactions you're going to see a huge gulf in winrate, because you've stripped out nearly all of the people who are showing up aiming to win the whole event playing as competitively as possible.

If you somehow controlled for "people who played the same faction and same subfaction in every competitive event they played that year" I promise you their win percentage would not crack 45% regardless of what the meta is.

the_scotsman wrote:

This is the attitude I disagree with here. We know that a huge percentage of the people who tend to perform best in tournaments switch their subfaction and their faction based on what is most powerful at the time. of COURSE if you look at ANY FACTION and remove the top 1-2 best performing subfactions you're going to see a huge gulf in winrate, because you've stripped out nearly all of the people who are showing up aiming to win the whole event playing as competitively as possible.

If you somehow controlled for "people who played the same faction and same subfaction in every competitive event they played that year" I promise you their win percentage would not crack 45% regardless of what the meta is.

With as easy as it is to boot up a Salamanders army on the cheap with Eradicators I have no doubt the transience is pretty easy these days, but it still doesn't support the notion that "simply playing marines grants you a huge advantage".

Salamanders have strats and benefits that need a good slap. Is GW going to have tackled those things with the codex in October? Dunno. They can screw it up real easily so we're walking a knife's edge still.

And of course soup is still alive and well, which complicates it further.

So they really didn't? I read somewhere here on Dakka (i don't remember which thread) that they asked some tourney guys to do it.

Much like 8th, 9th was purported to "the most play tested edition ever". Something else that triggered people was pointing out ahead of time that 8th was also "the most play tested edition" up to that point and it did not prevent GW from making GW mistakes. It was reported for example, that the GSC book in 8th was delayed due to outcry from the testers saying you can't release this - it's too much. Supposedly there was a similar outcry for IH but it was ignored that time.

I say that just by way of saying that I don't necessarily blame the testers. We don't know what conditions they were told to look at, what feedback they were asked for, or whether or not GW listened to them at all. I have heard some play testers quietly suggesting for example, that they mentioned the problem w/going first, while Mike Brandt recently entered a thread to essentially say that all the play testers found this not to be true after playing enough games. He did not state what "enough games" was. If I'm not mistaken, he had a large hand in mission design.

Anywho, they definitely play tested it, and it DOES seem like they used quite a few more people this time, but whether or not they did this to actually play test, or just as a way to get "influencers" talking about the new edition is really hard to tell.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:

This is the attitude I disagree with here. We know that a huge percentage of the people who tend to perform best in tournaments switch their subfaction and their faction based on what is most powerful at the time. of COURSE if you look at ANY FACTION and remove the top 1-2 best performing subfactions you're going to see a huge gulf in winrate, because you've stripped out nearly all of the people who are showing up aiming to win the whole event playing as competitively as possible.

If you somehow controlled for "people who played the same faction and same subfaction in every competitive event they played that year" I promise you their win percentage would not crack 45% regardless of what the meta is.

With as easy as it is to boot up a Salamanders army on the cheap with Eradicators I have no doubt the transience is pretty easy these days, but it still doesn't support the notion that "simply playing marines grants you a huge advantage".

Salamanders have strats and benefits that need a good slap. Is GW going to have tackled those things with the codex in October? Dunno. They can screw it up real easily so we're walking a knife's edge still.

And of course soup is still alive and well, which complicates it further.

Scotsmans argument is that any decent player only picks the best supplement so the people you're seeing scrape at 40-somethings are die hards who aren’t competitively minded.

The problem with all of this is that we never have a kind of control group.

Interpreting too much or too little into statistics is very easy, even if you are aware of that.

Tycho wrote:

So they really didn't? I read somewhere here on Dakka (i don't remember which thread) that they asked some tourney guys to do it.

Much like 8th, 9th was purported to "the most play tested edition ever". Something else that triggered people was pointing out ahead of time that 8th was also "the most play tested edition" up to that point and it did not prevent GW from making GW mistakes. It was reported for example, that the GSC book in 8th was delayed due to outcry from the testers saying you can't release this - it's too much. Supposedly there was a similar outcry for IH but it was ignored that time.

I say that just by way of saying that I don't necessarily blame the testers. We don't know what conditions they were told to look at, what feedback they were asked for, or whether or not GW listened to them at all. I have heard some play testers quietly suggesting for example, that they mentioned the problem w/going first, while Mike Brandt recently entered a thread to essentially say that all the play testers found this not to be true after playing enough games. He did not state what "enough games" was. If I'm not mistaken, he had a large hand in mission design.

Anywho, they definitely play tested it, and it DOES seem like they used quite a few more people this time, but whether or not they did this to actually play test, or just as a way to get "influencers" talking about the new edition is really hard to tell.

Thanks for your answer, I think we shall wait and see for the moment, the 2 codexes in October will probably give us some hints of what 9th is going to become. I hope there is some things we don't see yet but I'm a bit afraid of what is going to happen ^^

 Daedalus81 wrote:


And look how marines just dominate simply because they're marines and for no other reason!™

Keep in mind that when the population pool is overwhelmingly marines, most of the marine's wins are also against other marines [thus a marine vs. marine game drives the marine average to 50%], which can make things look okay even when it's not. I don't know which tournament you're pulling from, but do you have the non-marine faction stats for it too?

A 60/40 win rate is ridiculously skewed and far beyond anything anyone should tolerate. I find it amazing there are people arguing here that a skew that large is remotely acceptable.

It is possible that win rate will stabilize once people better learn how to play the new edition and if GW finds some way to better communicate what terrain is required to make for a balanced game. Saying "we don't have enough data, it may not actually be as bad as it seems" is defensible, saying "meh, it's no big deal if there is a 60% win rate for going first" is really not.

It's especially unacceptable when ITC had finally cracked the issue and come up with a ruleset that did not have any first-turn bias at all. GW then took all that ITC had learned over the years and threw it out in favor of their own system. So if their own system produces a very large skew...that's especially bad.

The Goonhammer article has the other faction winrates - worth a look keeping in mind it’s early. Harlies are the top. Marines are overwhelmingly the most taken army.

My local tourney had a good spread of factions, with demons at the top. That’s my little meta and not the top circuit one.

Rules wise I am happy with 9th. It is an improved 8th edition with more changes than I thought would come. I think it’s positive that we might have the competitive crowd using the GW missions. This might help with course corrections as the edition progresses.

Okay, I found the article...

28.3% of the players in question were playing Space Marines, not including any potential Space Marines among the Imperial Soup. That's a massive percentage of players playing Space Marines.

If you are a Space Marine player and were to be generous and assume that you have a random chance of drawing anybody else from the pool for each of the 329 recorded games, more than a quarter of your games would be against other Space Marines, and any Space Marine versus Space Marine game will actually just drive the faction winrate to an ideal average. Only non-mirror matches are relevant to presenting such numbers for balance purposes.

However in a tournament bracket, each game isn't random from the pool of other people present. Those who do well are paired with those who do well, and those who do poorly are eliminate. Thus, overperforming factions in general will all progress past the first round to increase their relative saturation in the more competitive later rounds, meaning they wind up with more mirror matches.

Thanks for your answer, I think we shall wait and see for the moment, the 2 codexes in October will probably give us some hints of what 9th is going to become. I hope there is some things we don't see yet but I'm a bit afraid of what is going to happen ^^

Yeah, I'm really banking on the hopes that a lot of the issues we're currently seeing (both as a local player group as well as in the community at large) are due to nothing more than Corona throwing off GWs release schedule. HOPEFULLY a lot of this makes more sense and works a lot better once we all start playing 9th edition with actual 9th edition books. Fingers crossed anyway.

71 % for salamanders.
OH boi, and we indeed have no mirrors removed...
OHHHHH BOIIIIIIIIII

Not Online!!! wrote:
71 % for salamanders.
OH boi, and we indeed have no mirrors removed...
OHHHHH BOIIIIIIIIII

71% without removing mirror matchups is really

Would also be funny to see how many of those salamanders armies where actually salamanders and not just Flavour odmf the month marines.

yukishiro1 wrote:
A 60/40 win rate is ridiculously skewed and far beyond anything anyone should tolerate. I find it amazing there are people arguing here that a skew that large is remotely acceptable.

Really? I find that even a 70/30 is acceptable if it's referred to games involving most of the factions and not only to top tier 1 vs top tier 2 or even a mirror match with just two top tiers 1 against each other. Maybe because I'm too used to play Orks and SW, but a 40% win rate at competitive level is pretty high unless playing the flavour of the month.

Generally speaking a 60/40 game is quite balanced IMHO.

To be clear, I was talking about the win rate from going first, not between factions. I.e. a 60% chance of the player going first winning. The discussion then seems to have moved on to faction vs faction winrate, but I was responding to earlier comments about the win rate for going first.

For balance between factions, any time a faction is going above a 60% win rate, or below a win rate in the low 40s, you've got a problem IMO.

 Blackie wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
A 60/40 win rate is ridiculously skewed and far beyond anything anyone should tolerate. I find it amazing there are people arguing here that a skew that large is remotely acceptable.

Really? I find that even a 70/30 is acceptable if it's referred to games involving most of the factions and not only to top tier 1 vs top tier 2 or even a mirror match with just two top tiers 1 against each other. Maybe because I'm too used to play Orks and SW, but a 40% win rate at competitive level is pretty high unless playing the flavour of the month.

Generally speaking a 60/40 game is quite balanced IMHO.

7 out of 3 wins is super skew. You are entering sports men dominating a type sport or professional players levels of win rates. Look at chess grandmasters most of them have a win rate of around 60%. having 70% is above genius tier of master, and often requires the master play a lot of matchs vs lower ranked people.

If an army is near 60% , or worse above 70% win rate, the win rate is crazy, specialy in tournaments.

yukishiro1 wrote:
To be clear, I was talking about the win rate from going first, not between factions. I.e. a 60% chance of the player going first winning. The discussion then seems to have moved on to faction vs faction winrate, but I was responding to earlier comments about the win rate for going first.

For balance between factions, any time a faction is going above a 60% win rate, or below a win rate in the low 40s, you've got a problem IMO.

No, I get it, it was about going first. But considering what armies? If any of the top SM lists goes first and has a 60% win rate against the best ork list I could field I'd love that Especially if I get the same rate by going first against the same list.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Karol wrote:


If an army is near 60% , or worse above 70% win rate, the win rate is crazy, specialy in tournaments.

If that high rate is referred to a specific army yes, if it's referred to any possible army that goes first it's not crazy.

Not sure that having a 60/40 or even worse a 70/30 split based on who got to go first 50/50 chance roll is a sign that the mission design is suitable, I'm sure their will always be armies that will prefer first or second due to their playstyle but right now it seems going first regardless of faction is better.

I would also like to point out that while it's good to see even more meaningful and reasoned analysis of the results, there is a small elephant in the room that a number of those lists that did well, like the ork buggy list, most of the Tau lists and I'm sure a few others aren't actually legal any more, orks because of FAQ answers making units no longer valid for matched play and Tau because GW can't points cost Ctrl+C Ctrl+V.

Dudeface wrote:

Scotsmans argument is that any decent player only picks the best supplement so the people you're seeing scrape at 40-somethings are die hards who aren’t competitively minded.

Sure, but it isn't that simple. Especially not now that painting requirements are built in. You'll get marine to marine (silver salamander successors, ho!), but not likely xenos to marine (some top players borrow armies, but that's like tippy top). And regardless the phrase has always been that marines are so good that new players would be discouraged out of the hobby.

Either way you introduce a lot of assumptions. We still have very little data and no codex proper so it does little for us to bother thinking about right now anyway.

Ice_can wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
71 % for salamanders.
OH boi, and we indeed have no mirrors removed...
OHHHHH BOIIIIIIIIII

71% without removing mirror matchups is really

Would also be funny to see how many of those salamanders armies where actually salamanders and not just Flavour odmf the month marines.

Katherine summed it up nicely..i'd really Like to See the non mirror matches and the top Table spread..

But 71% with mirror matches averages ....

Something ain't right

You know, if this is the Most Playtested Edition... Imagine the crap they did catch.

I want a list of the stuff they axed for being broken. The stuff that'd make Tzeentch cross all 12.7^e eyes in utter bewilderment.

 CEO Kasen wrote:
You know, if this is the Most Playtested Edition... Imagine the crap they did catch.

I want a list of the stuff they axed for being broken. The stuff that'd make Tzeentch cross all 12.7^e eyes in utter bewilderment.

Heck maybee it is indeed playtested but gw pulled an IH Lala Land and just ignored their testers again....

Heck the pts to hold us over also didn't inspired confidence..