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 H.B.M.C. wrote:

PenitentJake wrote:
Except that the bits sites had to do what to restock?

Buy multiple boxes.

So whether the end user was paying GW or the bits seller was paying GW, the older lists would still be more profitable if large numbers of players were fielding an optimized load out.

But GW doesn't see it that way. They see it as people buying bits from 3rd parties rather than buying entire new boxes from them.

Or third party at that


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Open War cards are great. People actually banned them? Sheesh... talk about having fun the 'wrong' way.

 Kanluwen wrote:
You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?

You think players were responsible for that frigging trash?

EviscerationPlague wrote:
Yes, as competitive players were fine procuring bits otherwise. Or do you think Sword Brethren got that treatment for balance reasons?

You really think that the players (of any type) had a hand in GW's changing the rules for unit upgrades?

Casual and super new players go hand in hand. I do blame them, correct.

It's weird that you would think the players have any impact there.

GW did it to undercut 3rd party bits sellers (and 3rd party bits makers as well, I suppose) because they were embarrassed in a very expensive court case.

Got nuthin' to do with "casual" players in the same way it ain't got anything to do with "competitive" players. It wasn't done as a balance decision, or an ease-of-use decision, or a barrier-to-entry decision, or a 'for the good of the game' decision. It was a business decision.

 auticus wrote:

But its hard to have random elements without feels bad moments.

Different mentalities. For those that want 100% control, yes its a huge feel-bad for a random element to occur you didn't optimize for.

For someone like me, that keeps the game fresher and allows for things I didn't even think of happening, which I enjoy quite a bit. However the maelstrom cards do have a tendency to go over the top with that so I agree they need refined a lot more.

I still can't believe "discard and draw a new card if this card is impossible to achieve" had to be houseruled into the game. Literally 2 days into the edition, that was the standard houserule pretty much worldwide. When that's the case, you know the playtesters should've thought of it before the book was printed...

Toofast wrote:

 auticus wrote:

But its hard to have random elements without feels bad moments.

Different mentalities. For those that want 100% control, yes its a huge feel-bad for a random element to occur you didn't optimize for.

For someone like me, that keeps the game fresher and allows for things I didn't even think of happening, which I enjoy quite a bit. However the maelstrom cards do have a tendency to go over the top with that so I agree they need refined a lot more.

I still can't believe "discard and draw a new card if this card is impossible to achieve" had to be houseruled into the game. Literally 2 days into the edition, that was the standard houserule pretty much worldwide. When that's the case, you know the playtesters should've thought of it before the book was printed...

I totally agree and that was another wtf moment where you have to ask if the designers are even playing the game at all as well.

Didnt the same thing happen with powers as well? I want to recall daemons being broken beyond words because you could spam d3 mortal wounds like it was nothing.

EviscerationPlague wrote:

Casual and super new players go hand in hand. I do blame them, correct.

What?
Just... what?

First, how in the world can new players be blamed for anything the company does? Are they reversing cause and effect and forcing GW to make bad decisions in the past?
That's so much worse than the usual 'blame the players' nonsense.

Second, no. Its entirely possible to recruit and train up new players in a 'tournament' mindset. I've seen it first hand- with Warmachine in this particular case, but the local Press Ganger took the casual game nights and turned them into tournament training camps about how to rules lawyer the most trivial nonsense to advantage and advised players on what they should and should not buy. Terrain was replaced with colored acrylic panels and felt smears, and any scenario that wasn't in the current SteamRoller set was quietly retired and made 'out of bounds.' [Sad end to this story: the PG pushed enough of the players to another store with more regular tournaments and game night died]

and turned them into tournament training camps about how to rules lawyer the most trivial nonsense to advantage and advised players on what they should and should not buy.

Amusing anecdote. One of our players made flash cards of scenarios you could rules lawyer and when the tournament team traveled and also during game night (training night) you'd drill on those cards.

The cards taught you how to argue both sides of any argument (a couple of the cards had three ways to argue the argument) as it was said that being able to argue rules to your favor was also a tournament skill.

When you hear stories about how a player argues something in their favor and then in the next game someone hears them arguing the same scenario in the opposite way, know that that is not a made up story and that it is in fact something people do train for lol.

 auticus wrote:

and turned them into tournament training camps about how to rules lawyer the most trivial nonsense to advantage and advised players on what they should and should not buy.

Amusing anecdote. One of our players made flash cards of scenarios you could rules lawyer and when the tournament team traveled and also during game night (training night) you'd drill on those cards.

The cards taught you how to argue both sides of any argument (a couple of the cards had three ways to argue the argument) as it was said that being able to argue rules to your favor was also a tournament skill.

When you hear stories about how a player argues something in their favor and then in the next game someone hears them arguing the same scenario in the opposite way, know that that is not a made up story and that it is in fact something people do train for lol.

Jesus thats insane to think this kinda thing happens. This is what i always mean when you can take out rules that "Caused arguments" but there will always be people like this to argue over anything in the game to just game the system.

 auticus wrote:
All knight lists are skew lists. In warfare, skew forces are specialist forces great at certain things and not so great at other things. I was a tanker in the army, and there were absolutely missions you did not send us on because tanks were really bad at certain things.

So as a Knight player I'm just going to refuse to play those missions, I'm playing narratively you know

The game tries to let you run skew lists and then treat them as if all of their matches should be even, which shoves the balance over to the skew lists, which is where you always get the phrase "its fine on the top tournament tables so its fine overall", because that just says "if you'd also run power skew you'd be fine so the game is fine".

I think you've got things the wrong way around, if Knights have a 50% win rate in your missions then people will say they are fine competitively, but when you look into it you will see Knights winning 70% in one mission and losing 70% in another mission. So you play the first mission and the game feels awful because wrenching victory points out of the Knights is damn near impossible and in the other mission your opponent cannot even put up a fight because that's the "Knights Bad! Mission". I want pure Knights to have a 40-55% win rate in every mission and an overall win rate of 45-48%. The question when you come to the table to play against Knights should be "do you have the tools to deal with Knights?" and "do you know how to leverage your tools?" not "are you playing the easy mission or the hard mission?"

PenitentJake wrote:
People don't hesitate to call a choice that isn't optimal a "trap choice" - funny that they never thought to call an optimal choice a "trap" because it isn't economically viable.

Buying a unit and then never using it because it is 40% overcosted isn't economically viable, that's why we call it a trap. It's rare that units are 40% overcosted, that's usually worst unit in the game category, but each edition usually still has one to five of those, I own 3 Reanimators, if not for Chapter Approved they would be that overcosted.

EviscerationPlague wrote:
Casual and super new players go hand in hand. I do blame them, correct.

Never heard of Timmy, Spike and Johnny? Never seen a 30-year veteran who has never sat down and read the actual rules of the edition but just play through osmosis and combines knowledge from several different editions to get through a game? Never seen someone who studied 40k religiously built a meta list and went straight to 2k points for their first game?

Voss wrote:
Its entirely possible to recruit and train up new players in a 'tournament' mindset. I've seen it first hand- with Warmachine in this particular case, but the local Press Ganger took the casual game nights and turned them into tournament training camps about how to rules lawyer the most trivial nonsense to advantage and advised players on what they should and should not buy. Terrain was replaced with colored acrylic panels and felt smears, and any scenario that wasn't in the current SteamRoller set was quietly retired and made 'out of bounds.' [Sad end to this story: the PG pushed enough of the players to another store with more regular tournaments and game night died]

"Vict you're not allowed to pre-measure, but see my arm *here* that's 11" long and there's no rule that says I cannot put my arm out over the table, see how I can tell that my Screaming Skull Catapult should fire about 30" now?"

"But mentor-sama that'll overshoot the unit you're aiming for"

"I'm not aiming for the unit I'm shooting at, I'm aiming at what's behind them and locked in combat."

"I don't exactly think that's legal mentor-sama"

*Skeleton dancing ensues*

Voss wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

Casual and super new players go hand in hand. I do blame them, correct.

What?
Just... what?

First, how in the world can new players be blamed for anything the company does? Are they reversing cause and effect and forcing GW to make bad decisions in the past?
That's so much worse than the usual 'blame the players' nonsense.

Second, no. Its entirely possible to recruit and train up new players in a 'tournament' mindset. I've seen it first hand- with Warmachine in this particular case, but the local Press Ganger took the casual game nights and turned them into tournament training camps about how to rules lawyer the most trivial nonsense to advantage and advised players on what they should and should not buy. Terrain was replaced with colored acrylic panels and felt smears, and any scenario that wasn't in the current SteamRoller set was quietly retired and made 'out of bounds.' [Sad end to this story: the PG pushed enough of the players to another store with more regular tournaments and game night died]

Agreed. I've met a number of new/newer players who jumped head-first into the competitive end of the 40k pool right off the bat. These are the kids who hear about the game online, learn as much as they can watching youtube, join some 40k subs and forums, pick up an understanding of gameplay and the meta pretty much through osmosis, etc. start building and planning an army and then show up to their first games with a list cribbed off of the guy who just won the LVO or whatever major tournament and talking about how whatever units really suck or something is "so OP" despite never having played before. Its not all new players, but its a decent number of them. Theres a lot more discourse out there from the competitive side than there is from the casual side, which usually means that those whos first introduction to the game comes by way of strangers on the internet (as opposed to friends and family who may be more casually oriented) will usually pick up the perspective of competitive gamers first.

If competitive players would be seriously about competition and measuring their skill in the actual game, the "pro league" tournament format should look something like this:

At the beginning of a new season, GW announces a set of 8-16 army lists. Those are fixed, 2000 pts lists that are the only lists legal in tournaments. Now burn and churn players will not mind buying new units, so that is not a problem. This creates a clear, hard and, most important, official divide between competitive and casual folks and at the same time provides a controllable and fair ground for tournaments. You can then level the field even further, by designing tournament mission packs and terrain layouts exactly for those armies. Another benefit - there is exactly zero room for min-maxing, the only leeway a player has is in choosing game time elements like relics, traits, etc. GW does not loose any money this way, because they directly control what tournament players have to buy and they will buy whatever won the last round before the next round starts. And then the season ends and the new is introduced, with new armies, so new units to buy. Moreover - now ANY unit can be a torunament unit, even thrash tier units, if only GW/offical TOs decide to make a "thrash tier units season", because every army in the tournament is on the same thrash level.

And what about casuals who want to participate in tournaments? Easy, the above is a "pro league", and next to it you can have an "open tournament" - no prizes, no glory, just an occasion to socialise and push minis around.

A win-win situation for everyone except for seal clubbers.

 vict0988 wrote:

 auticus wrote:
All knight lists are skew lists. In warfare, skew forces are specialist forces great at certain things and not so great at other things. I was a tanker in the army, and there were absolutely missions you did not send us on because tanks were really bad at certain things.

So as a Knight player I'm just going to refuse to play those missions, I'm playing narratively you know

Or, hear me out, Knights shouldn't just be Knights themselves but also their charges and full feudal houses?
Like be an actual full army list and not just Heavy / superheavy slots?
OR alternatively, be restricted to an certain ammount of points and not be sold as a full army.

And that is harsh, sure, but there is a thing called bad unfitting game design due to seize issues.
Knights literally tick all the issues associated to them. So does an all dreadnought army. A full tank army , etc. because all of these are forces and formations that do not fit the company level kinda GW intermediate Tg size.

(also , gw should really look into diversifying 40 k range of point level games and push better rules for apo and even smaller then normal 40 k games but gw does gw and just doesn't get it sometimes.)

Just as splitting out certain subfactions out of certain factions to DLC type sell rulesbooks is also rather bad from a game design perspective.

 vict0988 wrote:

"Vict you're not allowed to pre-measure, but see my arm *here* that's 11" long and there's no rule that says I cannot put my arm out over the table, see how I can tell that my Screaming Skull Catapult should fire about 30" now?"

"But mentor-sama that'll overshoot the unit you're aiming for"

"I'm not aiming for the unit I'm shooting at, I'm aiming at what's behind them and locked in combat."

"I don't exactly think that's legal mentor-sama"

*Skeleton dancing ensues*

I liked 8th's "always aim 6" in front of your target because then you'll always hit unless you spike on a small target" because it took ALL the guess work out of cannons.

 vict0988 wrote:

 auticus wrote:
You can look at some things and see how bent they are after about 5 minutes. Those are the things that need culled.

It's not hard to find bad hot takes, confirmation bias just makes it all seem obvious in hindsight.

 vict0988 wrote:

Bad Dakka predictions: Boyz will be terrible in 9th, T5 Boyz will be OP, transhuman Deathwing OP, Iron Hands/Drukhari/AdMech are fair.

Railgun HH stats are fine/insane, one will turn out to have been obvious but both have been made

I make predictions on a lot of units, but predominantly I stay in my lane as a purveyor of all thinks orky. When Boyz going to T5 was leaked, I was not surprised, in fact I had made that prediction almost a year prior in the Tactics thread. My initial reaction though was that I was afraid GW would nerf boyz in a host of other ways to make it a useless "buff". When the new Mob Rule got leaked along with the new boyz rules/strats etc I was 100% confident in my prediction that Boyz would be trash tier in the ork codex. Here we are 6 months later and my prediction has proven to be 100% correct.

So yeah, predictions can be all over the place but the broken/stupid ones are fairly easy to spot by the people who play that faction relatively competitively. The biggest problem for orkz is that most people who are "ork playtesters" don't actually play orkz as their main army, Reece saying the Stompa was OP as example 1-10,000.

Some things are so outrageous that anyone can see they are broken in and of themselves (IE in a vacuum) the aforementioned Transhuman deathwing is incredibly OP, sadly its one of the few things holding DA together atm, but that doesn't change the fact that it is OP. Chickenwalkers with D3+3 lascannons, obviously broken...so broken in fact that GW had to nerf them twice. I can keep going for a long time with obviously broken combos that were found within minutes of the rules releases but you get the point.

The problem with predictions stems from 2 major issues.

1: Not knowing the full extent of said unit. Boyz going to T5 is a great example of this. IN a vacuum if I told you that 8th edition boys were going to T5 you would immediately go "OH FETH! Thats broken!" and you would be right. outside that vacuum when you realize they suffered Nerfs to Ere we go, mob rule, lost +1 attacks, Lost 5++ KFF, lost all their stratagem support and now are losing about 40% of their mob to morale you can safely say "Oh feth they suck". So predictions made without the full picture can easily lead to errors, this among other reasons is why I'm still not sold on how OP the HH Railgun is going to be.

And 2: Non-faction players internal bias. As an ork player I see this a lot. "OMG ORKZ GET D3 ROKKITZ BROKEN!" or "That's ridiculous, flashgitz get 3 shots each!" Yes, in a SM list that would be broken. In an ork list where we hit on 5s and if we move or the enemy has -1 to hit we hit on 6s you quickly realize this isn't broken....and in fact its kind of crap. Case and point, Tankbustas, a unit armed exclusively with rokkitz is almost never seen, even in friendly games and Flashgitz which just got a buff (-2ppm) are still considered garbage tier. A lot of times people look at a unit or a part of one and internally they compare how that would work in their own army rather than how it synergizes with the army receiving that buff.

So as a Knight player I'm just going to refuse to play those missions, I'm playing narratively you know

Indeed thats been the story since skew lists were a thing, dating all the way back to the appendix imperial guard all tank list that was allowed into tournaments. If you introduced scenarios in campaigns where they had to move and take objectives, the player would refuse to play it (and likely call you out for playing house ruled unofficial nonsense).

In other games that do not reward skew by being always applicable, skew is not seen as much or only on special scenarios where you know you need an armor column for example. The reason being simply because skew is specialized and not all the missions try to tailor for allowing that, whereas in 40k its a feature (which again is why most of the lists I have ever encountered in my 40k career have been a version of some type of skew).

In Battletech if you show up to random games with a heavy or assault lance every game, you're going to have a bad time... because you are going to have scenarios where that heavy / assault lance is going to have rings run around it. Conversely there will be times that heavy / assault lance are the stars because some missions are tailor made for that.

Which is why in Battletech we have different lance types for different missions. Granted Battletech is a different world because there are often game masters controlling op-four, lists are screened, and there is no tournament standard that everyone builds to - but that is a game that is vastly more to my liking because the missions seem more like a wargame as you can't always run your heavy battalions every game and expect to do well all the time.

nou wrote:
If competitive players would be seriously about competition and measuring their skill in the actual game, the "pro league" tournament format should look something like this:

At the beginning of a new season, GW announces a set of 8-16 army lists. Those are fixed, 2000 pts lists that are the only lists legal in tournaments. Now burn and churn players will not mind buying new units, so that is not a problem. This creates a clear, hard and, most important, official divide between competitive and casual folks and at the same time provides a controllable and fair ground for tournaments. You can then level the field even further, by designing tournament mission packs and terrain layouts exactly for those armies. Another benefit - there is exactly zero room for min-maxing, the only leeway a player has is in choosing game time elements like relics, traits, etc. GW does not loose any money this way, because they directly control what tournament players have to buy and they will buy whatever won the last round before the next round starts. And then the season ends and the new is introduced, with new armies, so new units to buy. Moreover - now ANY unit can be a torunament unit, even thrash tier units, if only GW/offical TOs decide to make a "thrash tier units season", because every army in the tournament is on the same thrash level.

And what about casuals who want to participate in tournaments? Easy, the above is a "pro league", and next to it you can have an "open tournament" - no prizes, no glory, just an occasion to socialise and push minis around.

A win-win situation for everyone except for seal clubbers.

Except GW gets no data on how good any units are, only those specific lists and if you don't want to play that format with that list the game is going to have awful balance forever. Why would GW even be the best to set up this format? It was tournament organizers that invented Elder Dragon Highlander in MTG and it was popularized organically, not by Wizards of the Coast the owners of MTG. If you're interested in this format you could probably do a better job of setting up 8-16 balanced lists for it than GW could. But nobody actually wants to play this format, there is no organic interest, it's just a weird thought baby. It'd make more sense to do it with 500 pt lists, that way you can do a best of 3 format to increase the likelihood of the better player winning and I can have fun, tested and balanced lists to use for noob games.

Not Online!!! wrote:
...there is a thing called bad unfitting game design due to seize issues...

Why allow pure Knights to be really good at any mission? Why not make them bad in every mission?

 Sim-Life wrote:
I liked 8th's "always aim 6" in front of your target because then you'll always hit unless you spike on a small target" because it took ALL the guess work out of cannons.

Cannons should have worked like bolt throwers, scatter dice and templates should have been removed, steadfast should have been less reliable, hordes and spells that ignore magic resistance should not have been added to the game.

@SemperMortis I think Reece was too busy to do a great job being a playtester, if you want to hate him for being part of the Stompa being released at a useless pts cost that's fair, at the same time we also know that GW isn't good at making playtesters effectively playtest rules. As far as I recall it took a while before the Castellan took over the meta, so even one of the relatively strongest lists of all time was not immediately and obviously OP to anyone reading the book and the idea to combo it with Astra Militarum and Blood Angels weren't either, otherwise, everyone would have been taking it week 2 instead of week 24 or 36, I cannot remember exactly how long it took. Iron Hands and Drukhari players have defended their factions as being totally fair when they undoubtedly weren't, either people that play a faction are not always as good as you are at knowing how rules and points changes will affect the strength of their faction or all these people were trying to gaslight everyone on Dakka. I choose to believe ignorance over malice.

nou wrote:

At the beginning of a new season, GW announces a set of 8-16 army lists. Those are fixed, 2000 pts lists that are the only lists legal in tournaments.

Listbuilding is one of my favorite parts of the game. If they did that, I wouldn't play in tournaments.

 vict0988 wrote:


@SemperMortis I think Reece was too busy to do a great job being a playtester, if you want to hate him for being part of the Stompa being released at a useless pts cost that's fair, at the same time we also know that GW isn't good at making playtesters effectively playtest rules. As far as I recall it took a while before the Castellan took over the meta, so even one of the relatively strongest lists of all time was not immediately and obviously OP to anyone reading the book and the idea to combo it with Astra Militarum and Blood Angels weren't either, otherwise, everyone would have been taking it week 2 instead of week 24 or 36, I cannot remember exactly how long it took. Iron Hands and Drukhari players have defended their factions as being totally fair when they undoubtedly weren't, either people that play a faction are not always as good as you are at knowing how rules and points changes will affect the strength of their faction or all these people were trying to gaslight everyone on Dakka.

Reece among basically all other Ork playtesters

As far as Castellans...no they were OP from release. The problem, and biggest issue with them is that they were one of the newest armies in the game (if not the newest). And they weren't competitive in and of themselves, they were only competitive when you combined them across multiple different armies because they were incredibly CP hungry. In other words, you would have to know the new knights army AND another imperial faction really well in order to see the benefits, and specifically that 2nd faction would likely have to be Imperial guard since it was the loyal 32 that really broke the system and fed CP into that behemoth. The guy who won ITC in 2018 and then LVO in 2019 switched over from straight IG with a Shadow sword to an IG/Castellan list within months of the IK Codex coming out.

To your second point that obviously broken armies (Iron Hands/Drukhari) were defended by their player base...yes, this happens with every single broken faction, and usually its from the tryhards/WAAC players who don't want their easy mode button taken away. For every IH player who defended the codex there were at least a dozen pointing out the obvious problems. And most of those IH players were using armies painted Red, Blue or Green for some reason.....almost like SM players can just play numerous different factions by simply saying "I'm this codex now".

Another great example would be 7th edition where you had the Tau, Marine and Eldar players rabidly defending their codex saying they weren't broken. Remember 7th edition Eldar? Throw a dart at the Eldar codex a few times and you had a better than average competitive list basically. SM got 400-500pts of free vehicles. Tau got shoot twice triptides. So yeah, you will have players defend broken units/codex because they don't want to lose, but that doesn't change what I said. An honest person who understands a faction can tell you from the start whether a unit is badly broken or not. I still don't think Buggies/Dakkajets were broken. I think the combo with them in Freeboota was broken, but that could have easily been addressed a host of different ways instead of just nerfing the units into the ground. I think the main problem with that is the Freeboota Kulture is inherently OP when given even better than average shooting units. A dakkajet as an example with 36 S6 -1AP shots sounds broken at 120pts, until you realize without Freeboota kulture its only hitting 12 times on average. You are talking about 4dmg on average to a Marine. So 120pts kills 40pts of Intercessor. Make it freeboota and use the WAAAAGH! and that's when its firmly OP, it averages 21 hits and 9dmg to a Marine statline, or 120pts killing 90pts of Intercessor a turn.

 vict0988 wrote:

nou wrote:
If competitive players would be seriously about competition and measuring their skill in the actual game, the "pro league" tournament format should look something like this:

At the beginning of a new season, GW announces a set of 8-16 army lists. Those are fixed, 2000 pts lists that are the only lists legal in tournaments. Now burn and churn players will not mind buying new units, so that is not a problem. This creates a clear, hard and, most important, official divide between competitive and casual folks and at the same time provides a controllable and fair ground for tournaments. You can then level the field even further, by designing tournament mission packs and terrain layouts exactly for those armies. Another benefit - there is exactly zero room for min-maxing, the only leeway a player has is in choosing game time elements like relics, traits, etc. GW does not loose any money this way, because they directly control what tournament players have to buy and they will buy whatever won the last round before the next round starts. And then the season ends and the new is introduced, with new armies, so new units to buy. Moreover - now ANY unit can be a torunament unit, even thrash tier units, if only GW/offical TOs decide to make a "thrash tier units season", because every army in the tournament is on the same thrash level.

And what about casuals who want to participate in tournaments? Easy, the above is a "pro league", and next to it you can have an "open tournament" - no prizes, no glory, just an occasion to socialise and push minis around.

A win-win situation for everyone except for seal clubbers.

Except GW gets no data on how good any units are, only those specific lists and if you don't want to play that format with that list the game is going to have awful balance forever. Why would GW even be the best to set up this format? It was tournament organizers that invented Elder Dragon Highlander in MTG and it was popularized organically, not by Wizards of the Coast the owners of MTG. If you're interested in this format you could probably do a better job of setting up 8-16 balanced lists for it than GW could. But nobody actually wants to play this format, there is no organic interest, it's just a weird thought baby. It'd make more sense to do it with 500 pt lists, that way you can do a best of 3 format to increase the likelihood of the better player winning and I can have fun, tested and balanced lists to use for noob games.

Since GW is now officially partnered with ITC I see no problem in relegating building such lists by ITC or even the council of the top players from the previous year. And nobody want's to play this format, because to my knowledge, it hasn't been proposed yet, so it is no surprise, that there is no movement behind it. We sometimes discussed the idealised version of this with TOs providing armies (literally, providing minis) for participants, but my proposition get's rid of this problem. And you perfectly know, and it has been mentioned in this thread many times already, that in 40K if something is not god given official it might as well not exist at all, so this must come from either GW themselves or a large TO like ITC to gain traction.

But as Toofast already replied, I am perfectly aware, that such format will never exist in 40K, because despite all the talk about "skill measuring", most of competitive players focus on squeezing as much of advantage they can in the listbuilding stage, not actually having to show their tactical prowess during the game.

And I like your "mini" format of 500 pts. Heck, why not go full on this and make categories for Combat Patrol/Incursion/Strike Force. If 40k is suppose to evolve into an e-sport, why not follow how other sport disciplines are organised? Tournament scene in 40K has always been in this weird state of being pseudo-serious, half arsed endeavour that promotes all sorts of abuse, like those examples of training rules lawyering described above. My proposition let serious players train for the actual set of challenges new season provides. There is no chasing an ever broken meta, there is applying your deep understanding of the game to show your actual skill. There is even no problem with missing the mark with some of those lists, because if you (general you) are so good at spotting the OP/UP, you simply won't choose a given army and choose what you think gives you the best chances of winning.


And you are wrong about balancing only a specific subset of units, because, as I wrote, you can compose such lists from any units in the game. Then play a season with those units, then e.g. replace half of every list with other units and do an iterative balancing, so many times proposed in this thread as an ultimate solution to establish "good enough". With a proper design, you could cover a very large amount of units in just two-three seasons this way. And what else you achieve, is that if you construct tournament armies from mediocre units, then seal clubbing newbies and mismatches at FLGS would be far less common, because sworn tournament players would be training with mediocre armies, so the general health of the community would go way up because as shown by the Toofast reply - you get rid of minmaxers with "git gud" attitude toward newbies.

I see no real flaw in this concept except for enormous inertia of 40K community, stuck in ruts of list building as a vital skill and not wanting to accept the fact that there won't ever be enough balance to get rid of broken lists and seal clubbing. It has been 30 years now and such state has never been achieved. "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results..." and all that.

chaos0xomega wrote:

Agreed. I've met a number of new/newer players who jumped head-first into the competitive end of the 40k pool right off the bat. These are the kids who hear about the game online, learn as much as they can watching youtube, join some 40k subs and forums, pick up an understanding of gameplay and the meta pretty much through osmosis, etc. start building and planning an army and then show up to their first games with a list cribbed off of the guy who just won the LVO or whatever major tournament and talking about how whatever units really suck or something is "so OP" despite never having played beforet.

Ooh, I love running into those players. Especially the ones spewing statistics & talking crap.
I played one just last week (before the CA prs drop went into effect). College kid. From the conversation he A) played Custodes, B) evidently had a few games xp with the new codex already, C) was inquiring when the shops next tourney was/looking to practice & seeing when the best times to get games.

Thought he had it all figured out & that tourney win %s mean something.

So we grabbed a table & I demonstrated that it's not the Necron at the tourney you read about that you need to be concrrned with, it's the Necron your playing against....

I like you Vict - but I'm not sure I'd agree with your memory.

Case in point. The Knights codex was released in early June 2018 - and the Castellan was a new model you had to get hold of. By 28th September GW released a FAQ that sought to reign in the combination of smash captains and knights. ( https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/09/28/28th-sept-warhammer-40000-big-faq-2-the-low-downgw-homepage-post-1/ )

If GW has noticed something is an issue at competitive events - you can bet it was there earlier than that. From what I remember "Knight meta" became a thing more or less instantly. Guard+BA CP farming was also widely known by this point. I think we are talking week 6 at the latest (2 is more likely tbh - but I can't immediately identify the tournament) - certainly not 36, as that's approaching when the 2020 April FAQ came in to put the Castellan down.

The main reason I think that "Castellan+BA Captains+Guard" didn't absolutely dominate things immediately (or, arguably, ever) was that many debated whether this was in fact the best combo (something which I think would run and run). You could for example slot in Custodes biker captains. You could just go full on Guard. Some of these changes probably occured as a result of GW's changes to the game throughout this 9ish month period of woe.

In more practical terms - generally speaking theorycraft is easy when you are looking at A+B+C. So Semper's right, a lot of people overestimated the boyz changes (although some of us were I think replying to his thread just to keep the conversation going) because the nerfs and removals weren't as obvious. But undercosted buggies/flyers+freebooterz+Speed Waaagh=60-70% damage returns on loads of stuff was all too accurate. Because there was no obvious way it couldn't be.

(Its why yes I do think the Railgun HH is overpowered - if its not on meta because all desirable targets have been driven from the table that's hardly good for the game as a whole.)

The biggest prediction I'd say Dakka got wrong was that assault would be useless. This was rooted in the idea that 8th (and specifically 8th ITC) was devolving into castled up gunlines that hid in the corner. 9th's core rules did nothing for units trying to cross the table to get to do any damage - so how would they prove effective? Well it turns out the Primary objective does a good job of stopping that hide in the corner approach, as if you do your opponent will just run away with the Primary. But it was hard to make that leap without experience.

Regarding "skew lists", mission design, and win rates...

7th edition with formations and onward to 8th/9th with the detachment structure, let the genie out of the bottle and allowed players a lot of leeway to build "skew" lists within the context of competitive play. Back in the day, if people wanted to play knights or some other crazy list, you just talked to your opponent about playing a "narrative" game or whatever - maybe you picked a straight up fight/annihilation type mission.

The thing was, the "matched" play rules and mission designs, back in say 4th edition, were really quite varied in terms of objectives - much more so than they are today. 5th edition really started to simplify mission structure IMHO, but 4th was great. The result of this is that, when combined with the standard force org charts, you built lists accounting for the possibility of doing very different missions. How does my list work if I need to defend bunkers? What if I get ambushed? What units would I use if playing a sentries-based mission. Am I durable enough to hold the middle? Am I fast enough to get a force distributed across the board.

The greater diversity missions meant that there wasn't an optimal list relative to any given mission. You could take the approach of building a "skew" list, but that meant you might fare poorly on one set missions but excel at another. You could also take the approach of making a more "balanced" TAC list that had a good way to respond to any mission you might end up in.

When a critical mass of people deviated towards a "balanced" list it meant that the differences in relative list strength between any two matchups was reduced - making the game "slightly" less about list building and slightly more about tactical execution.

Yeah and once things moved from list building there was a big stink.

But I also want to bring up one of the darlings of 4th edition. I also abused this at the GT level heh the Imperial Guard leaf blower list.

You just sat there and rolled buckets of dice and removed enemies wholesale.

The mission didn't matter (its been a while, so I may be mis remembering some things) because just wiping out my opponents netted me the win.

It was so gross. And unfun. But I was winning tournaments so that was how I 'had fun' at the time. (and feel bad about it today because a lot of people jumped out of 40k specifically because of that build and not having fun playing against it)

EDIT: I know people attribute leaf blower to 5th edition (and it was part of that as well) but the word was used in 4th as well. That was the title of my army builder roster file "leaf blower" and I know that those were from 4th edition days as I jumped out of tournaments at the end of 4th and stuck with narrative in 5th.

nou wrote:


And nobody want's to play this format, because to my knowledge, it hasn't been proposed yet

Nobody wants to play that format because people like listbuilding as part of the game. It would be like the NFL if the league dictated which players were on which teams. The GM position would be pointless, no trades, no free agency market, that stuff is a big driver for fan interest. Building a roster is part of winning a super bowl, which is how it should be. Building a strong list for the current meta and terrain/missions at a given tournament is part of winning a tournament, which is how it should be. Your idea isn't unpopular because it's so groundbreaking nobody has ever heard or thought of it, it's unpopular because it's a bad idea.

Toofast wrote:

nou wrote:


And nobody want's to play this format, because to my knowledge, it hasn't been proposed yet

Nobody wants to play that format because people like listbuilding as part of the game. It would be like the NFL if the league dictated which players were on which teams. The GM position would be pointless, no trades, no free agency market, that stuff is a big driver for fan interest. Building a roster is part of winning a super bowl, which is how it should be. Building a strong list for the current meta and terrain/missions at a given tournament is part of winning a tournament, which is how it should be. Your idea isn't unpopular because it's so groundbreaking nobody has ever heard or thought of it, it's unpopular because it's a bad idea.

It's not a valid comparison. The valid comparison is if you let chess players pick their pieces before each game. Even if there were point costs to the pieces and, say, 2000pts allowance, and pieces abilities were "updated" every now and then, you would get as crap of a skill measuring game as 40K is.

nou wrote:

Toofast wrote:

nou wrote:


And nobody want's to play this format, because to my knowledge, it hasn't been proposed yet

Nobody wants to play that format because people like listbuilding as part of the game. It would be like the NFL if the league dictated which players were on which teams. The GM position would be pointless, no trades, no free agency market, that stuff is a big driver for fan interest. Building a roster is part of winning a super bowl, which is how it should be. Building a strong list for the current meta and terrain/missions at a given tournament is part of winning a tournament, which is how it should be. Your idea isn't unpopular because it's so groundbreaking nobody has ever heard or thought of it, it's unpopular because it's a bad idea.

It's not a valid comparison. The valid comparison is if you let chess players pick their pieces before each game. Even if there were point costs to the pieces and, say, 2000pts allowance, and pieces abilities were "updated" every now and then, you would get as crap of a skill measuring game as 40K is.

You would be right, if this were designed as a symmetrical game with 1 faction. I would say 32 teams with different playstyles and a cap on how much they can pay for players is more analogous to 40k with multiple factions with different playstyles and a cap on how many points they can spend on their army than chess with 2 identical sides. You can't make both sides of 40k symmetrical unless you're only using a single codex.

Listbuilding is a fundamental part of the game because a big part of 40k is player's choice, it is building your army with your choices.

That's why every time GW takes a choice a way from the player there is uproar.

 Tyran wrote:
Listbuilding is a fundamental part of the game because a big part of 40k is player's choice, it is building your army with your choices.

That's why every time GW takes a choice a way from the player there is uproar.

Is a netlist really "your army with your choices"? How exactly an officially given set of lists is different from a set of netlists that dominate the meta every time around?

 auticus wrote:
Yeah and once things moved from list building there was a big stink.

But I also want to bring up one of the darlings of 4th edition. I also abused this at the GT level heh the Imperial Guard leaf blower list.

You just sat there and rolled buckets of dice and removed enemies wholesale.

The mission didn't matter (its been a while, so I may be mis remembering some things) because just wiping out my opponents netted me the win.

It was so gross. And unfun. But I was winning tournaments so that was how I 'had fun' at the time. (and feel bad about it today because a lot of people jumped out of 40k specifically because of that build and not having fun playing against it)

EDIT: I know people attribute leaf blower to 5th edition (and it was part of that as well) but the word was used in 4th as well. That was the title of my army builder roster file "leaf blower" and I know that those were from 4th edition days as I jumped out of tournaments at the end of 4th and stuck with narrative in 5th.

Leaf blower could not exist in 4th as IG did not get vehicle squadrons until 5th, nor could all of their infantry take Chimeras unless they spent a doctrine point.

They didn't have a 4th edition codex, so you could only play 4th with the heavily constrained 3.5 Dex.

nou wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Listbuilding is a fundamental part of the game because a big part of 40k is player's choice, it is building your army with your choices.

That's why every time GW takes a choice a way from the player there is uproar.

Is a netlist really "your army with your choices"? How exactly an officially given set of lists is different from a set of netlists that dominate the meta every time around?

Every single player at every single tournament doesn't play with a netlist. I usually look at netlists and make my own lists using a combination of those units, I don't just copy/paste the latest netlist. That's what most players do. I'll use recent LVO as an example again, the winning list was his own creation and not a copy/paste. The Tyranid lists that did well were all different, too. I don't see this problem either at huge GTs or in my monthly FLGS tournaments with 20 players. Where are you seeing tournaments with every single list being a copy/paste?