Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

SecondTime wrote:
"army design rules that can be used to reduce skew and rein in army construction "

None that GW is ever going to agree to use.

Yup. GW uses the carrot of overpowered datasheets to encourage skew lists i.e. there's always something, usually a hot new release, that's just waaaay too powerful in a codex that you want to max out your FoC of. Then they punish you because your army doesn't look like the combined arms force that everyone is supposedly supposed to look like.

But their logic of which datasheets are overpowered was very random until very recently I think. Why would they consistently overpower ancient Eldar sculpts? Why would they release so many new models with absolutely terrible rules? I mean ,they're still doing that: exhibit A: canoptek reanimator.

There is no logic because its all accidental.

Most 40k players buy models only because they look cool, the casual crowd is always the most prevalent and the main source of revenue for game companies.

In that regard, the tripods are a success because the mini look good and thats all that matters.

The mistakes!
Sorry for the joke, but having read this tread (https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/793969.page), I haven't been able to old it back.

SecondTime wrote:
But their logic of which datasheets are overpowered was very random until very recently I think. Why would they consistently overpower ancient Eldar sculpts? Why would they release so many new models with absolutely terrible rules? I mean ,they're still doing that: exhibit A: canoptek reanimator.

My opinion on it is honestly just that the "thing is overpowered to drive sales" is actually a pretty rare occurrence even in the 'bad old days' of GW. it happens every once in a while, usually blantantly obviously, but the vast majority of the time I really do chalk it up to GW just being really gakky at game design and not knowing what makes a good unit vs a bad unit.

Just look at the whole "castellan" thing. Boy howdy were the 'GW MADE THEM PURPOSEFULLY OP TO SELL MODELS AAAAAAAARGH' folks out in force then, huh. Weird thing about that: Only one model out of the whole release was 'OP to sell models' while the rest, generally, did not appear in pretty much any competitive lists.

Did GW just not...care to sell Armigers? Helverins? The Valiant that came in the exact same box as the purposefully op Castellan? Princeptor (or whatever the feth that thing is called)?

Wasn't castellan driven by a specific house as well?

the_scotsman wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
But their logic of which datasheets are overpowered was very random until very recently I think. Why would they consistently overpower ancient Eldar sculpts? Why would they release so many new models with absolutely terrible rules? I mean ,they're still doing that: exhibit A: canoptek reanimator.

My opinion on it is honestly just that the "thing is overpowered to drive sales" is actually a pretty rare occurrence even in the 'bad old days' of GW. it happens every once in a while, usually blantantly obviously, but the vast majority of the time I really do chalk it up to GW just being really gakky at game design and not knowing what makes a good unit vs a bad unit.

Just look at the whole "castellan" thing. Boy howdy were the 'GW MADE THEM PURPOSEFULLY OP TO SELL MODELS AAAAAAAARGH' folks out in force then, huh. Weird thing about that: Only one model out of the whole release was 'OP to sell models' while the rest, generally, did not appear in pretty much any competitive lists.

Did GW just not...care to sell Armigers? Helverins? The Valiant that came in the exact same box as the purposefully op Castellan? Princeptor (or whatever the feth that thing is called)?

I think without knowing certain details we could never know GW's ultimate plan or reason for doing anything. Their goal is maximum money. So Selling out of the OP models super fast with others getting bored and just buying something else cause they were hyped about plastic crack today and just want something to build / paint. I think they have found that keeping imbalance in the game keeps models flying off the selves in the ways they want them to. The ultimate limiting factor for GW profit is their ability to make kits - they can only make so many and it is really a lot more limited than we realize. So they don't ever want to be making 1 type of kit for too long to keep up with a demand. Plus they want you buying stuff of their shelves and not just whats coming out of their factories. So they keep varying what is strong and what is weak and play with supply to keep you buying things you didn't even know you wanted.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
There is no logic because its all accidental.

Most 40k players buy models only because they look cool, the casual crowd is always the most prevalent and the main source of revenue for game companies.

In that regard, the tripods are a success because the mini look good and thats all that matters.

Didn't one of the design team members who worked on eldar in its prior era said that they tested and build the wraight knight, and then the sales departament told them to shave of 150pts of the whole thing, so that people could fit in 2-3 in their list. So sometimes they seem to know very much what they are doing.

When for AoS they made books after book that was OP and required to buy 3 zombi dragons or 3 greater demons, and a bucket of kits to summon, they seemed to have done that on purpose too.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

SecondTime wrote:
Wasn't castellan driven by a specific house as well?

yes, specific house and a specific cawl relic gun.

Oh, yeah. I wouldn't say they NEVER purposefully leave a unit overtuned in order to sell, or purposefully overbuff an underperforming faction in order to sell it.

I'm just saying I'm extremely skeptical of the claims of the FREQUENCY of that occurring, and I also think that GW has an equivalent if not greater tendency to punitively nerf something and leave it obviously underpowered for an edition or more in order to get people to forget about the thing they were mad about previously.

There's a reason Scatter Lasers and Wraithknights have been as bad as they have been for 2 straight editions. But people love that! Even people who very specifically suffered through an entire edition of punitive bad balance screaming and crying for every minute of it will laugh and gloat the second that punitive bad balance is applied to *insert faction they don't like here*.

I'm particularly skeptical when the OP crazy thing requires some hyperspecific combination of this trait and that relic and this stratagem and that subfaction and this forgeworld model that technically has THIS keyword...no. That's accidental. And most of the time GW doesn't even realize it's in there. IH invincible Leviathans were not "a secret plot to sell Leviathan Dreadnoughts."


Automatically Appended Next Post:
GW abso-fething-lutely practices the extremely common business strategy of "manufactured discontent". The way they release codexes and new editions is an obvious indicator of this. People are SUPPOSED to be absolutely livid when they play their CSM against loyalist SM right now who get Doctrines and CTs on their vehicles and double the wounds for a tiny sad little points bump.

Because if playing that matchup makes you miserable, you're likely to either A, buy units for a different army, win for GW, or B, get really excited when GW finally releases the new CSM codex with all the fixes and buffs and tweaks they've been just desperate to have for so long.

Karol wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
There is no logic because its all accidental.

Most 40k players buy models only because they look cool, the casual crowd is always the most prevalent and the main source of revenue for game companies.

In that regard, the tripods are a success because the mini look good and thats all that matters.

Didn't one of the design team members who worked on eldar in its prior era said that they tested and build the wraight knight, and then the sales departament told them to shave of 150pts of the whole thing, so that people could fit in 2-3 in their list. So sometimes they seem to know very much what they are doing.

When for AoS they made books after book that was OP and required to buy 3 zombi dragons or 3 greater demons, and a bucket of kits to summon, they seemed to have done that on purpose too.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

SecondTime wrote:
Wasn't castellan driven by a specific house as well?

yes, specific house and a specific cawl relic gun.

the wraithknight is confirmed as true. As for the AoS stuff, it could very well be that the designers decided to make the centerpiece models actually good for once, which means people spammed them.

the fact that every new release isnt OP shows that its not a recurring thing. They happen by mistakes, and the more moving parts a piece has to become OP, the less chance there is for it to be intentional. IH leviathan, Raven castellan and Ynnari as a whole were all accidental mistakes.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

Karol wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
There is no logic because its all accidental.

Most 40k players buy models only because they look cool, the casual crowd is always the most prevalent and the main source of revenue for game companies.

In that regard, the tripods are a success because the mini look good and thats all that matters.

Didn't one of the design team members who worked on eldar in its prior era said that they tested and build the wraight knight, and then the sales departament told them to shave of 150pts of the whole thing, so that people could fit in 2-3 in their list. So sometimes they seem to know very much what they are doing.

When for AoS they made books after book that was OP and required to buy 3 zombi dragons or 3 greater demons, and a bucket of kits to summon, they seemed to have done that on purpose too.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

SecondTime wrote:
Wasn't castellan driven by a specific house as well?

yes, specific house and a specific cawl relic gun.

the wraithknight is confirmed as true. As for the AoS stuff, it could very well be that the designers decided to make the centerpiece models actually good for once, which means people spammed them.

the fact that every new release isnt OP shows that its not a recurring thing. They happen by mistakes, and the more moving parts a piece has to become OP, the less chance there is for it to be intentional. IH leviathan, Raven castellan and Ynnari as a whole were all accidental mistakes.

I'd also point out, and I say this as someone who doesn't really know the Wraithknight story, but just based off this explanation of it, 'make it 150 points cheaper so people can have 2-3' isn't the same as 'make it overpowered at 150 points cheaper'. They could've scaled down the power to reflect the point cost. I generally agree with the idea that the rules team just isn't that good at knowing what will be super strong.

As for what GW did right, I think the GK psychic awakening was great.

Audustum wrote:
...I'd also point out, and I say this as someone who doesn't really know the Wraithknight story, but just based off this explanation of it, 'make it 150 points cheaper so people can have 2-3' isn't the same as 'make it overpowered at 150 points cheaper'. They could've scaled down the power to reflect the point cost. I generally agree with the idea that the rules team just isn't that good at knowing what will be super strong.

As for what GW did right, I think the GK psychic awakening was great.

The other part of the story is that the "make it 150pts cheaper" instruction was followed with "oh, no, don't tone it down at all, leave the rules as they are."

The GK psychic awakening gave the army a few big shiny card-game combos to throw at a Paladin unit to justify not fixing any of the stats. I think it's possibly the most wrong thing GW has done with an army update since I've been playing.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

Karol wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
There is no logic because its all accidental.

Most 40k players buy models only because they look cool, the casual crowd is always the most prevalent and the main source of revenue for game companies.

In that regard, the tripods are a success because the mini look good and thats all that matters.

Didn't one of the design team members who worked on eldar in its prior era said that they tested and build the wraight knight, and then the sales departament told them to shave of 150pts of the whole thing, so that people could fit in 2-3 in their list. So sometimes they seem to know very much what they are doing.

When for AoS they made books after book that was OP and required to buy 3 zombi dragons or 3 greater demons, and a bucket of kits to summon, they seemed to have done that on purpose too.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

SecondTime wrote:
Wasn't castellan driven by a specific house as well?

yes, specific house and a specific cawl relic gun.

the wraithknight is confirmed as true. As for the AoS stuff, it could very well be that the designers decided to make the centerpiece models actually good for once, which means people spammed them.

the fact that every new release isnt OP shows that its not a recurring thing. They happen by mistakes, and the more moving parts a piece has to become OP, the less chance there is for it to be intentional. IH leviathan, Raven castellan and Ynnari as a whole were all accidental mistakes.

I think you are correct as they don't intend on making a certain unit OP upon design. It is utter negligence that they do not do a review or a play test with everything involved in a book they are going to sell 100k copies of. It is really hard to imagine that a company that makes so much money with so much money on the line could be THAT negligent. It almost impossible to be that neglagent. It is ether.
-Indifference
-Intention
-the most gross negligence imaginable.

 generalchaos34 wrote:
Despite all of the people who want to hate on GW I often try to find a silver lining. Before you ask I try not to be an apologist but its more me trying to see the good in things. So what do they do well?

EVERYTHING

Despite the many stupid decisions, bonehead moves, dead end editions (damn you 7th!) and other bad moves GW has made a game that has ultimately made me happy. That says a lot that I have consistently played something for over 23 years at the tender age of 35. I have always had a fun hobby of painting, building, collecting and playing ready to go. I can look at my models and be proud (or cringe) and its been a source of joy for me. I love the novels and I have read over a 100 of them. Everything they do, even when its dumb, has ultimately added to my life. In years past I have gone through some very very dark parts of my life and one constant that was always there was my 40k hobby. It sustained me, distracted me, and let my imagination fly when the rest of my world, my life, and my very identity crumbled. No matter what happened I knew that Space Marines were still out there fighting Tyranids, Commissars killed their own men, and Erebus was just the worst.

So yeah, GW has done all kinds of things great, and I am glad and ultimately still exist because of it.

Exalted. I have written something similar (about Fantasy) in defense of a more critical attitude about GW the corporation. The shareholder model of latter day capitalism must die, and what happened to 40K lately and the Old World previously are a couple of great examples of why.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
Why do YOU think GW got rid of it if its so superior? I think negative feedback from a lot players about the vehicle rules were one of the motivations. Not the sole motivation, but one of several.

I think the primary motivation was to make the game design easier; i.e. laziness (or a recognition of incompetence). I think the other reason might be that they've lost the plot a bit on how the narrative/setting informs the game design, and so such changes have no drawbacks. (If one no longer cares about how "true to the setting" the game is, then restricting oneself to try to be true to the setting is obviously silly).

I'm not sure GW gives one flying feth about negative feedback from 3rd-5th editions. They may have cared about negative feedback from 7th, but the way to fix that could've (and should've) been to carefully examine the flaws behind the feedback and then iteratively improve, rather than throw the baby out, keep the bathwater, and then find a new baby to put in the filthy water.

Man, you are on fire this thread! I am going to wear out my exalt button!

the_scotsman wrote:

GW abso-fething-lutely practices the extremely common business strategy of "manufactured discontent". The way they release codexes and new editions is an obvious indicator of this. People are SUPPOSED to be absolutely livid when they play their CSM against loyalist SM right now who get Doctrines and CTs on their vehicles and double the wounds for a tiny sad little points bump.

Because if playing that matchup makes you miserable, you're likely to either A, buy units for a different army, win for GW, or B, get really excited when GW finally releases the new CSM codex with all the fixes and buffs and tweaks they've been just desperate to have for so long.

Dear crap. I told myself I was waiting till CSM/EC came out to consider giving GW money for anything again, but I had definitely been operating on Hanlon's Razor and assumed that the current environment was a product of incompetence, not malice. I hadn't considered the idea that they'd planned for precisely that. If that's true, that's some emotionally manipulative, predatory fecal sludge right there.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
Sure it was unnecessary. But it also didn't make things worse. Just different.

Oof. I hated armor arc debates. The front armor arcs of my opponents just kept getting wider as the game went on. Such a chore.

Well, it did make things worse.

Verisimilitude is a positive thing to have in a wargame. Less verisimilitude is a worse thing. Adjusting the abstraction to make vehicles into wound-pinatas while still differentiating between a stick, a sword, and a hammer is the wrong kind of abstraction to make, and creates a sensation that the game is "gamey" while disconnecting it from the greater universe it lives in.

Gamey is something that nuGW does right, but it is not a good thing.

I think we can expect more gamey "fixes" in the future. I think a gamey paradigm is easier for them to cope with development-wise. The realism or appearance of realism being discussed is probably off the table permanently. Gw let eradicators through playtest. The idea of the same people doing vehicle pivots and firing arcs is laughable.

SecondTime wrote:
The idea of the same people doing vehicle pivots and firing arcs is laughable.

To be fair, they have abandoned that particular target audience years ago.

 BertBert wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
The idea of the same people doing vehicle pivots and firing arcs is laughable.

To be fair, they have abandoned that particular target audience years ago.

I know that. I'm just musing on the realism issue. I'll settle for not having units like eradicators. But others clearly want more.

The game would be much better if all armies were full of units like eradictors. Good, efficient units, you want to use and play with.

GW artificialy createst the problem for players though, by making some books and armies "for fun", while other armies getting rules and interactions between them clearly ment for playing the game efficiently. And in the end it doesn't even matter how often do they do it on purpose and how often do they just forget that something like a chaplain dread or a leviathan exists.

Karol wrote:
The game would be much better if all armies were full of units like eradictors. Good, efficient units, you want to use and play with.

Hard pass, they are gimicky not tactical but actually just gamebreaking and a sign of poor Quality assurance.

GW artificialy createst the problem for players though, by making some books and armies "for fun", while other armies getting rules and interactions between them clearly ment for playing the game efficiently. And in the end it doesn't even matter how often do they do it on purpose and how often do they just forget that something like a chaplain dread or a leviathan exists.

See above,

Karol wrote:
The game would be much better if all armies were full of units like eradictors. Good, efficient units, you want to use and play with.

One man's 'good, efficient' is another man's unfair, overpowered.

If everything was as 'efficient' as an eradicator unit, every game would be decided on the first turn, with the player who goes first automatically winning.

which would give us a 50/50 win ratio. go ask people whose armies have a 46/26% win rate if they were happy with a 50/50 split aka having fun in half the games. For a ton of armies the game is already decided by the roll who goes first more often then not.

Karol wrote:
which would give us a 50/50 win ratio. go ask people whose armies have a 46/26% win rate if they were happy with a 50/50 split aka having fun in half the games. For a ton of armies the game is already decided by the roll who goes first more often then not.

that is to assume that you could then not just substitute the game by a coin flip. Because that is what the game would devolve into.

Infact a coinflip is even more interactive then your suggestion because going first , aka flipping, is not guaranteeing the result.

nah it ain't more interactive. Because the first person doesn't get two turns of obliterating the other one. In fact with games ending faster you could play two games in the same time, with both players going first. And the victory points system could be build around playing both games, just like in chess.

A lot better then going second, seeing opponent take the optimal anti your army secondaries, him swarming the objectives turn 1 for primary objectives, and telling GG to your opponent, because no amount of tactical skill can beat out going first, with tailored secondaries and better rule set.

That's one of the reasons I think the smaller ("minimum") board size is stupid. My friends and I generally find that 40K is a lot more balanced on a much bigger board, with a lot of scenery obviously. First-turn advantage gets evened out if you have a turn or two of movement before actually getting in to range of the enemy / objectives.

Balance is more than the 50/50 split.

Balance means that victory or defeat in the mission/scenario is determined in largest proportion by player skill and choice, rather than pre-game factors such as turn order, army choice, list composition, or mission special rules.

I would say that the ideal distribution for game factors would be:
- 20-33% listbuilding. Listbuilding should matter to some degree, because it's a skill all its own and players should ensure they have the tools to be skillful with.

- 66-80% player skill. Player skill I define here as tactical or gameplay acumen. There are two subcategories - 'gotcha' moments, where gamey rules interactions are exploited, and 'proficiency', where simply being better than the opponent at the more basic game structure (movement, shooting, scoring, etc). Gotcha moments represent things like the Fiend problem (where you ensure you get a fiend .75" away from a model that is touching someone else, meaning that model and that model alone can swing at it). The line here is blurry, and none of it should be blamed on the players. Most wargames have gotcha-style mechanics because they're inevitable, but to reiterate I think that the game should strive to allow players to win with basic tools and actions used in novel or useful ways.

- 0-10% missions. I like creative missions a lot as a narrative player, but in a "Standard Game" (which is what I am talking about when I say balanced; narrative scenarios are easier to create if the base game is balanced), the mission shouldn't matter much. A bit of skew is okay - reducing the chance of victory for one side by 10% is probably the most I would go to. But it should always be easily surmountable by player skill, even if one player does ultimately have a handicap.

- 0% Turn order: Turn order should be 0% for reasons that need not be explained further I suspect.

Remember, the goal of a roughly 50/50 winrate isn't really a goal at all - rather, it makes a significant assumption ("Across the whole spectrum of players, the skill level will be roughly equal between faction pilots.") in order to inform a model which suggests games should be a coinflip (because the largest component of victory is equal between the sides).

Board size has zero impact on how fast you reach your opponent or objectives.

The only thing larger tables do is make deep striking easier and create more space to evade slow and low ranged units.

 Jidmah wrote:
Board size has zero impact on how fast you reach your opponent or objectives.

The only thing larger tables do is make deep striking easier and create more space to evade slow and low ranged units.

Well, that's not fair. A 12' by 8' board with like 18" deployment zones would have an effect.

Karol wrote:
The game would be much better if all armies were full of units like eradictors. Good, efficient units, you want to use and play with.

oh hell no. Eradicators are one of the most boring unit designed so far in the whole game (not even talking about powerlevel here).

i'd much rather play with generalist units that are better at more than a single task


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Karol wrote:
nah it ain't more interactive. Because the first person doesn't get two turns of obliterating the other one. In fact with games ending faster you could play two games in the same time, with both players going first. And the victory points system could be build around playing both games, just like in chess.

A lot better then going second, seeing opponent take the optimal anti your army secondaries, him swarming the objectives turn 1 for primary objectives, and telling GG to your opponent, because no amount of tactical skill can beat out going first, with tailored secondaries and better rule set.

Then you'd just have enough time to do two coinflip. This would 100% be terrible for the game. Maybe you're mad that your GK are terrible if they go second, which is understandable, but asking for every unit in the game to be eradicator level is one stupid take. GKs can be fixed some other way, so can all the underperforming armies right now.