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.

Making a bunch of rando lists and playing them against each other isn't a good way to test lists. When Privateer Press hired Will Pagini, one of the best Warmahordes players in the world, he started spamming units during playtest games and quickly found units that cause issues whereas prior the playtesters had never played that way before so they never caught spam lists as a problem.

 Sim-Life wrote:
Making a bunch of rando lists and playing them against each other isn't a good way to test lists. When Privateer Press hired Will Pagini, one of the best Warmahordes players in the world, he started spamming units during playtest games and quickly found units that cause issues whereas prior the playtesters had never played that way before so they never caught spam lists as a problem.

This is what I advocate for.

Hey, just a question for the thread because I haven't tried this myself, and even if I had, there would still be no basis of comparison because I'm not familiar with matched missions.

White Dwarf updated the Maelstrom rules for 9th: has anyone tried them?

Just seeing the comment about defining "casual" by greater mission diversity made me think of those, and I'm curious about what this crew thought of them.

Here's the Goon's take on it:

https://www.goonhammer.com/th-editions-new-beta-maelstrom-of-war-missions-a-review-with-battle-reports/

As a casual narrative player, I found them to be fun because each game was different. I also loved the sigmar open war cards because each game was different, and you couldn't optimize for scenarios which meant the lists tended to be saner.

From a competitive standpoint they are infuriating because you can't optimize for them which renders listbuilding not as impactful, which leads to upset feelings and negative play experience if your prime interest is in listbuilding and optimization.

They are definitely a tool that forces you to REACT as opposed to going in ahead of time knowing whats coming and letting you tune for that. I tend to appreciate missions in wargames where I can't know everything and tune for everything so I enjoy things like Maelstrom a lot more than your typical competitive player does.

They also due to their being missions that make you REACT means you have to be playing the game in the spirit of fun and playing the game as opposed to in the spirit of competitive sporting leagues, which are two very different approaches to a game.

 vict0988 wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:
Making a bunch of rando lists and playing them against each other isn't a good way to test lists. When Privateer Press hired Will Pagini, one of the best Warmahordes players in the world, he started spamming units during playtest games and quickly found units that cause issues whereas prior the playtesters had never played that way before so they never caught spam lists as a problem.

This is what I advocate for.

It's weird, but I'm kinda ok with that.

I think if someone showed GW, to their collective faces, how the game is played, rather than this weird version that they seem to play, it could lead to a positive outcome.

 vict0988 wrote:

I think you need at least 10 lists to test a faction, with Space Marines and a few others ballooning in the number of datasheets available I'd say the average is 20 lists. So it'd take 10 years to test the game this way. In the current format people will organically try a variety of lists in tournaments and people will copy those that do well making it relatively easy to spot where the problems are in the case of an OP faction or where the problems aren't in the case of an UP faction.

You missed the part, where those lists are designed by the best players committee in the first place. According to the wisdom of this very thread, they should be able to spot the glaringly OP/UP elements when they work on a set of balanced lists for the season, just as they currently do, but instead of exploiting those for advantage, they can use those to construct well balanced lists. And what is more - you are not working from scratch to begin with - you take the current state of the meta and arrange the lists for the first season based on current data.

But you are also stuck in the rut here, because the most crucial difference this format makes is in the play culture as a whole. When you have a set list of armies it is detrimental to deviate from such lists in your tournament prep games at FLGS - if you min-max at FLGS to easily win games then you will lack the necessary skill at the actual tournament. And just like that, puff! goest the problem of seal clubbing. You won't see spamming the best units when at the actual tournament players will have only one copy of it at their disposal, etc...

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 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.

Go buy yourself a copy of Chapter approved 2001.
GW sold me (and others) a helluva lot of tanks 2001-2002 because of that book. My local shops tables looked like we were playing WH40K:Kursk! You can absolutely "Leafblow" opponents off the board with IG tanks in 3e.
It was also absolutely used in tournaments. Wich caught people unprepared because at the time it wasn't that common to bring alot of armor/heavy armor to tourneys - so people only included limited AT in their lists. Often nicely confined to a single HW Plt./Dev squad.
And IIRC they went on to reprint/revise the AC rules two or three more times. bAlso, the Armegeddon Steel Legion (from 3rd edition) had to have every infantry squad mounted in Chimeras.

As for "Leafblower" in general? Despite not having some internet guy to name it, you've always been able to make lists that rolled a ton of dice & wiped the opponent off the board. Doesn't have to be a Guard list.
* It's how I started playing this game in a FLGS tourney in the closing days of RT!
My friend Dan needed a 40k smackdown something bad. So bad that it inspired me to spend $$, effort, & join a whole different minis game. So I made a Wolfguard Termie list with as many assault cannons & cyclone launchers, bribed the shop owner to pair us up in round 1 (because I needed to properly surprise Dan & that'd have been lost if we didn't play each other 1st), and blew him off the table on turn two. Ok, technically turn 3 as I had to pick off some random survivors....

After seeing the Eldar/CSM box reveal and the confirmation that Nids are next I feel like GW made a last minute decision to delay CSM to be packaged with SM 2.0

Jarms48 wrote:
After seeing the Eldar/CSM box reveal and the confirmation that Nids are next I feel like GW made a last minute decision to delay CSM to be packaged with SM 2.0

more likely that we're gonna see something happen with chaos overall

CSM/Demons/Knights

I play in local tourneys. I would not be in favour of having competitive games restricted to certain pre-approved lists. Part of the fun of 40K for many is selecting your army. I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do? Mind your own list? I get having the odd tourney with new restrictions/themes to keep things fresh, but we can leave that to the TOs as they respond to their playerbase.

While I could get behind a "player code of conduct", I do not see the need for the creation of formal Casual Matched Play and Competitive Matched Play modes. Saying that "Casual means playing for fun" isn't very helpful. Although it does occur, I don't worry too much about so-called seal-clubbing. The folks that I interact with that do participate in ITC don't waste their table-time smashing a new player. They are looking for a warm-up or test match which they won't get crushing some poor new-comer. Table time is money.

For me, its implied that a tourney game will be against someone with a tuned list whilst a pick-up game will be also Matched Play but perhaps tuned to 80%. And if I come up against someone with the current hotness in a pick-up game what's the worst thing that happens? I lose while getting to see what has people all upset.

We already have the ability to say "Grand Tournament 2022 Mission Pack - 2000 points?" If that is not your jam then politely decline the game. Players can also say "I am new to 40K - looking for an intro game" or words to that effect. Pre-game discussion can be very helpful, but it doesn't need to be legislated with yet another mode of play that will elude definition. Legislation is not a great approach to make up for a lack of emotional intelligence in wargaming. A quick pre-game conversation can avoid hurt feelings, as can an honest appraisal of your own goals and abilities.

Maybe I am just lucky to be in a fairly laid-back community that can also dial it up when appropriate? We're self-regulating. Thing is, my last three gaming communities as I move around have been that way.

What it sounds like you just said was "we don't need things like that because I don't have to worry about it, and haven't had to deal with that, so sucks to be you".

Thats awesome you've had self-regulating communities.

Thats not 100% everywhere and its a recognized problem with a lot of communities that I think could use some solid solutions toward. What I'm used to are people playing how the book lets them play. If the rules say they can, they will. If you aren't having fun because you are wanting to play a narrative force thats your problem, not theirs, and they will club away with impunity until you either quit or sell off your narrative forces and chase after the plastic meta dragon with them.

Lets use an empathy exercise. Lets say you are a tournament player that loves optimizing, listbuilding, and tuned hardcore lists.

Lets say your entire community tells you to gtfo with that nonsense and you have to field a more fun narrative force that you aren't having fun with, but you have no one in your community that will play your optimized listbuilding list. Lets say that the default discussion online is also narrative play and you have to dig hard to find the optimization chats.

That would be a problem for those people guaranteed and understandably so.

 auticus wrote:
What it sounds like you just said was "we don't need things like that because I don't have to worry about it, and haven't had to deal with that, so sucks to be you".

Thats awesome you've had self-regulating communities.

Thats not 100% everywhere.

Sure. My own experience is limited to the places I've lived and gamed, keeping in mind that it is since 2nd Ed in four cities with lots of cross-pollination. I take my gaming as it comes, but I also make an effort to see the experience from my opponent's perspective. I don't need a rule to tell me to communicate and have some empathy. If you don't have empathy no amount of legislation is going to instill in you. I try to be pragmatic with my expectations as well as understand the situation (tourney vs pickup etc). Maybe I've just been lucky in my communities, but things are going well. Tourneys here sell out in minutes - its easy to arrange a game when we are not in lockdown. My 40K gaming life is good. Should I feel bad about that? I am guessing you had a falling out? It happens. Take a break. Don't take the burden of the entire gaming community's enjoyment on your shoulders.

Anyhoo.

Edit - sorry, I missed your edit/addition. I certainly try to be empathetic, but that might not extend to continually playing in mode that I do not enjoy. I absolutely enjoy games where we decide ahead of time to try something "narrative", but I enjoy Matched Play under tourney conditions more. Its also easier to arrange. Some casual narrative folks have very specific parameters!

So go with your empathy exercise, lets say for argument's sake that my 40K community suddenly transforms into a narrative-only community with very strict rules about army composition. I guess I will have a decision to make with some broad options. I guess I can go with the flow; I can try to negotiate; I can look for another group; or I can walk away from the game? As the great poet said: "leave the pieces on the floor and move on." If I am "the only one in step" on the parade then perhaps its time for me to stop parading? This is a leisure activity, not a job. If I am never having fun/just not enjoying it then I will leave. I left 40K in 7th, albeit due to the rules rather than the community. I wasn't having fun so I stopped playing. I focused on Flames of War. Came back for 8th, leaving FOW after a bit of their 4th Ed. If I find I am out of step with my opponents or the game in the future I am prepared to politely show myself out while also keeping my miniatures.

Now, don't think that I don't worry about my community. If a new player says they are looking for an intro game I will jump on that to arrange the best, most fun learning game that I can. If I see that a friend is down I will try to cheer him up. I will allow people to have bad days and I appreciate when they allow me to have a cranky moment. But anyway.

While we all have the right to play, we don't necessarily have the right to play exactly as we see fit. We need to play with broadly like-minded people making compromises along the way. In the meantime GW will try to figure out what makes the most people happy knowing that pleasing everyone is impossible. Sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they don't.

This is probably a controversial suggestion, and somewhat counter-intuitive to the intended gameplay mode, but I actually think a "casual" game mode would benefit from a more restricted force organizational chart.

For example, something like needing a 2:3 ratio of troops to non-troop units (excluding HQ) - and also a restriction of no more than 1:1 ratio of any specific type of specialist unit to troops.

So for example, if you took two troops, you could have 2 elites and 1 heavy support (2 troops : 3 total specialists) but not 3 elites (as that would exceed the 1:1 troop to specific specialist ratio).

Obviously, this would need to carefully consider the balance and potency of each faction's troop selections to make the not feel like penalty or a tax to take. Troops units should be fun and effective to field, as they are the core type of unit.

Such a move would help level of the playing field a little between armies and force players into taking more well-rounded armies, instead of giving people the option to make detachments of all elites or whatever. Let people go to town on alternative force organization in full blown "unrestricted" competitive / tournament play or whatever.

ccs wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 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.

Go buy yourself a copy of Chapter approved 2001.
GW sold me (and others) a helluva lot of tanks 2001-2002 because of that book. My local shops tables looked like we were playing WH40K:Kursk! You can absolutely "Leafblow" opponents off the board with IG tanks in 3e.
It was also absolutely used in tournaments. Wich caught people unprepared because at the time it wasn't that common to bring alot of armor/heavy armor to tourneys - so people only included limited AT in their lists. Often nicely confined to a single HW Plt./Dev squad.
And IIRC they went on to reprint/revise the AC rules two or three more times. bAlso, the Armegeddon Steel Legion (from 3rd edition) had to have every infantry squad mounted in Chimeras.

As for "Leafblower" in general? Despite not having some internet guy to name it, you've always been able to make lists that rolled a ton of dice & wiped the opponent off the board. Doesn't have to be a Guard list.
* It's how I started playing this game in a FLGS tourney in the closing days of RT!
My friend Dan needed a 40k smackdown something bad. So bad that it inspired me to spend $$, effort, & join a whole different minis game. So I made a Wolfguard Termie list with as many assault cannons & cyclone launchers, bribed the shop owner to pair us up in round 1 (because I needed to properly surprise Dan & that'd have been lost if we didn't play each other 1st), and blew him off the table on turn two. Ok, technically turn 3 as I had to pick off some random survivors....

I played (and have played ever since) Armored Company/Armored Battlegroup/Emperor's Fist since forever.

It had the opposite problem - it lacked the resilience of mechguard (especially 5e Leafblower) because the tanks could be stunned or damaged. Stunning a Chimera in 4E shut it down and the passengers could only fire Lasguns and one other weapon (at the risk of being open Topped) and only if they weren't forced to disembark by a penetrating hit.

In 5e:
1) pens no longer forced a disembark
2) instead of 6 lasguns and one open-topped fire point, chimeras got 5 closed fire points.
3) Veterans became troops choices and got access to 3 Special, 1 Heavy, and one Heavy Flamer with special pistols on the sergeant. Combined with 2, that essentially meant Chimeras got 3 unstunnable plasma guns and some change (possibly a plasma pistol, for 7 shots)
4) penetrating hits no longer forced you to disembark, so the unit was safer and could merrily continue to act irrespective of damage to the vehicle
5) the damage chart in general was more forgiving, making low-armor cheap vehicles (like the basilisk, medusa, and hydra) relatively more durable for their points than the vehicles that paid for thick armor but used the same damage chart (Russes)

The Leafblower list in 5th ran barely any Russes at all, as +~30 points per tank for AV 14 wasn't worth it compared to the same (or greater) firepower for cheaper on the AV 12 chassis vehicles.

This is why Armored Battlegroup (which existed with Leafblower) was barely even mentioned when top IG tournament lists were discussed.

In his Dec 99 White Dwarf apologia for the newly-released 3rd Ed Imperial Guard Codex, Jervis referred to the nerfs to the "Shooty Imperial Guard Army From Hell (SIGAFH)" that had appeared with the 3rd Ed MRB list. Naming scary lists is not a new thing! He says that while few had enough Plasma guns and Lascannons to make it work (reader looks guiltily askance), "while winning lots of games, was not by all accounts very exciting to use." There is a history of army lists being used in the wild in ways not foreseen by those inside the walls of Nottingham (all pulsa-rockets in 2nd, Wolfguard Terminators with Assault Cannons and Cyclone Launchers in 2nd, etc).

The SIGAFH could indeed generate an eye-watering amount of damage in a fairly small list. A brief moment in the sun. The massed suns of plasma that is. Alpha Strikes are not a new thing.

And their solution to this was to make plasma guns slightly more expensive, right?

TangoTwoBravo wrote:

I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do?

That's my favorite part about the argument. They don't even see the irony of "competitive play sucks and you're all having fun wrong...so here's how should change competitive play (that I never participate in)"

Toofast wrote:

TangoTwoBravo wrote:

I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do?

That's my favorite part about the argument. They don't even see the irony of "competitive play sucks and you're all having fun wrong...so here's how should change competitive play (that I never participate in)"

Yeah but it is a 2-way street.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
And their solution to this was to make plasma guns slightly more expensive, right?

Yes - the price of a Plasma Gun went from 5 points to 8 points, with all Guardsmen going up 1 point as well. That added up in a list. Leman Russ also went up. It was the first deliberate nerf that I recall besides the great "blip" of going from 2nd to 3rd when many things changed all at once. The dance has been going on for some time.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Racerguy180 wrote:

Toofast wrote:

TangoTwoBravo wrote:

I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do?

That's my favorite part about the argument. They don't even see the irony of "competitive play sucks and you're all having fun wrong...so here's how should change competitive play (that I never participate in)"

Yeah but it is a 2-way street.

Each game is a 2 way street with two players that have agreed to have a game. The difference is that tourney players are not demanding changes to the way that two non-tourney players are having their narrative or casual game, or criticizing them for the way that they have fun.

It understand that a player could feel frustrated if they are the only one that wants to play "narrative" while the rest of their community want to practice for a tournament. That is the result of free-will/free market. If you don't want to play "competitive" - then maybe don't? Maybe find like-minded players? It is not everyone else's fault that they have fun differently than you. Your isolation would be somewhat self-imposed.

If someone posted on our message board (we are trapped in the early 2000s but it works) that they only want to play a narrative game based on their favourite Badaab War fan fiction then I might give it a whirl in accordance with their parameters once or twice. Not my cup of tea, but hey, cleanse the palette. In the meantime I will continue to enjoy tournaments and the associated preparations/list tinkering/practicing/fine tuning with like-minded people. We'll police ourselves thank you.

TangoTwoBravo wrote:


Each game is a 2 way street with two players that have agreed to have a game. The difference is that tourney players are not demanding changes to the way that two non-tourney players are having their narrative or casual game, or criticizing them for the way that they have fun.

Of course the tourney players are not demanding changes to the approach/style of matched play - matched play is setup and intended to cater to what they want.

The issue, which we're debating, is that there is swath of players that don't want their match play games to all be "tourney prep" games. And neither open play nor narrative/crusade play fits the bill either. Matched play adopting and increasingly looking (or out right being) the ITC format is unfortunate. There is a lot of space in the casual to competitive continuum that are is wholly glossed over in the current approach to setting up games.

nou wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

I think you need at least 10 lists to test a faction, with Space Marines and a few others ballooning in the number of datasheets available I'd say the average is 20 lists. So it'd take 10 years to test the game this way. In the current format people will organically try a variety of lists in tournaments and people will copy those that do well making it relatively easy to spot where the problems are in the case of an OP faction or where the problems aren't in the case of an UP faction.

You missed the part, where those lists are designed by the best players committee in the first place. According to the wisdom of this very thread, they should be able to spot the glaringly OP/UP elements when they work on a set of balanced lists for the season, just as they currently do, but instead of exploiting those for advantage, they can use those to construct well balanced lists. And what is more - you are not working from scratch to begin with - you take the current state of the meta and arrange the lists for the first season based on current data.

I still don't see how you get a smidgen of data from this. If my best players committee thinks that a list with 2 Land Raiders, 6 Eradicators, 20 Assault Marines is balanced against a list with 1 Wraithknight, 2 Warwalkers, 20 Dark Reapers and 10 Dire Avengers what do I learn from that? I don't learn whether any of the units are strong or weak like I would from studying current tournament results, all I learn is which of the 16 lists are stronger and weaker relative to each other and which player that plays this game mode is the best at this game mode. If all lists where from the same faction you could get some good data, but internal balance is still only half the game.

 Mezmorki wrote:
This is probably a controversial suggestion, and somewhat counter-intuitive to the intended gameplay mode, but I actually think a "casual" game mode would benefit from a more restricted force organizational chart.

Easier to just play highlander (rule of 1) with rule of 3 for Troops and Dedicated Transports. Sometimes it's the darndest lists that do the best. Was my Novokh Infantry horde more competitive than my Szarekhan list with a mix of vehicles, monsters and infantry? The 60 Flayed Ones that won me 2/3 games in the first list have since gone down 23%, I don't think the second list got any discount, it miraculously won me 3/3 games. Is spamming Canoptek Reanimators a problem when they are overcosted? I think a compassionate effort to make a casual list is good enough. If you're not able to discern a casual list from a competitive one and accidentally make one of the latter then you're probably not a threat on the table. A Monolith in 8th was actually just as good as a Knight provided the Knight took a melee weapon and just stood guard in the deployment zone instead of rushing up and chopping the Monolith easily in half.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I think if someone showed GW, to their collective faces, how the game is played, rather than this weird version that they seem to play, it could lead to a positive outcome.

They see when they visit tournaments. "Woah, someone used this one flamer Stratagem from a book with another flamer Stratagem from a book and it caught us off guard when we saw at a tournament" *both Stratagems are in the same book* I'm not asking for the game designers to be competitive, but there are so many ways that this is an obvious question to ask. Even if you're not competitive and not looking for only the best combo, it'd still be interesting to learn how much damage you can output with a unit of Aggressors just for the heck of it, like we sometimes discuss "who can throw the most dice in one shooting attack" or something like that, but GW was totally uninterested and just printed Stratagems seemingly for the sake of printing Stratagems.

Toofast wrote:

TangoTwoBravo wrote:

I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do?

That's my favorite part about the argument. They don't even see the irony of "competitive play sucks and you're all having fun wrong...so here's how should change competitive play (that I never participate in)"

I disagree.

I think a lot of people have been accommodating to the notion that competitive gaming is fine and has its place, but not everyone wants it all rhe time and feel its not suitable in every scenario for every opponent. No one's said you're having fun wrong. What theyre saying is 'it has its place'. And you don't seem to want to see or accept that.
There's a big difference between saying 'competitive play sucks' and 'there's a lot of negative consequences from that style of play for some people, not everyone wants that kind of thing. maybe you should be aware of those concerns and desires, and be aware that doubling down on the competitive approach and being hostile towards and unwilling to listen to, entertain or compromise with other people is destructive to everyone in the long-term' In other words, i think it's good to consider accomodating for the greater health of your community and our community overall. And lets be realistic. Ours is a small community overall. The 'elite' game cannot exist without the grass leagues and both need to be supported for the game and the community to flourish - look at how wmh fell away because the over competitives refused to consider anything that wasn't a 75pt steamroller ultra cutthroat list. Compromise and accommodations for others is a fundamental building block of community. Who knows, you might enjoy a stint in the grass leagues away from the A-tier units game too.

I say that as someone who played high level games in both 40k and wmh. I've seen both sides of it.

Hell, in the real world we don't even think twice about accomodating our friends and partners. if I am able to accomodate my wife's passion for her football team and get season tickets (when I have zero interest in the sport) and join her every weekend for five odd years for all the games, and there are fewer things worse than the dreary and incredibly rough hoofball played in Scottish 'premier' football through the dreary miserable cold wet weather that is the Scottish winter (and spring, summer, autumn), toning down my list for someone who's not into tourneys is a breeze. And yes it should be considered the other way too out of politeness if nothing else (but again, low powered lists are not poisoning your games with high-powered builds, the opposite sadly cannot be said. And take this from someone who has taken both). Everyone benefits from people willing to accomodate. And hey, it doesn't have to be all the time either. Just be aware that its a thing.


And just to note, for the bolded bit - you're missing the point here just claiming people want change to games they don't play. if you're into competitive games and you play other folks that are into that - that's fine! However, the point a lot of people here have been saying is that is not the case the other way round- even if you're not into competitive gaming, you can't escape it or conpetitive types taking it everywhere else too. It seeps into every other approach and every other game type. Some find this toxic and destructive and I've seen more than one person feel that competitive players often just don't care and throw down their tourney lists against you anyway. their experience with their competitive players, over competitive players and competitive-at-all-costs players is they bring that attitude everywhere, especially where its not welcome and against all players regardless of context. then they just shrug their shoulders and ignore the consequences of their actions nd decisions and their role in it. And that is a problem. It doesn't matter where tprople like auticus go. Like I said, you might not be a bad guy, but you don't have to be a bad guy to be the villain in someone else's hobby, destroying it for them. I'm sure the likes of auticus and nou don't want to play against tourney lists, and would be happy, like me, to play narrative games in the grass leagues with other d-grade lists, and leave the a-lists to you - its frustrating as hell that you can't or don't want to see that.

And one final point. Just because you are in the status quo position and benefit from the situation as it is, doesnt mean the situation isn't problematic or doesn't need to change. I can point to plenty historical and modern precedents where change, whether cultural or not was necessary and the status quo wasn't beneficial.

@Vict That just leads back to the whole "the rules are too bloated" thing. Lets be honest if you wanted to thoroughly playtest a model each single model now has so many variants and additional rules like strats and auras that its basically impossible to feasably test everything properly.

Of course it doesn't help when you have people like Jake who think that "more rules = more fluffy" and want to apparently balance the game by being additive instead of subtractive.

 Sim-Life wrote:
@Vict That just leads back to the whole "the rules are too bloated" thing. Lets be honest if you wanted to thoroughly playtest a model each single model now has so many variants and additional rules like strats and auras that its basically impossible to feasably test everything properly.

Of course it doesn't help when you have people like Jake who think that "more rules = more fluffy" and want to apparently balance the game by being additive instead of subtractive.

Canoptek Wraiths must have 1 of 2 melee options and up to 1 of 2 shooting options. That's a total of 6 loadouts, I don't think you need to test 6 lists with 18 Wraiths to test the Wraith datasheet. Test 1x3 and 3x6 with whatever weapon option the player feels is best for the army that is being tested. #1 math will have made the issue of internal datasheet balance small in the first place #2 if you see Wraiths in tournament play you will most likely see only one loadout get used, buff the others or nerf the one that is getting used. 6 months of some of the loadouts being worse than the others isn't so bad. What's bad is when there is a clear disparity, like when you can get an extra gun for free, there is no reason not to take the extra gun, you don't actually need to playtest to avoid stupid gak like that. Whether that pistol should be 1 or 4 points is not so important, because sometimes the gun will be worth 1 and sometimes the gun will be worth 4, as long as the gun is worth it in some situations and not always worth it.

You do make a really good point though, it's probably something I'm going to think about a lot more because I really hate it when you're more or less forced to rip miniatures apart to give them a different loadout. The safe bet is to keep the same unit loadout good through editions. So if whips and pistols are good in 9th they should be good in 10th, leave all the other loadouts as niche builds that are only sometimes good. Asking whether you should equip pistols to your Wraiths when you first build them is not as big a deal as having to repaint Wraiths you've had for years because the designer thought "this is the edition of the heavy gun, not the pistol". Like you shouldn't release a new gun like the grav cannon or D-flamer and instantly make them the far more pts-efficient option. I don't care if the new gun is scarier, but then give it a high enough price that people that have an existing collection with the old-school lascannons or D-cannons are better in most cases.

 Sim-Life wrote:
Making a bunch of rando lists and playing them against each other isn't a good way to test lists. When Privateer Press hired Will Pagini, one of the best Warmahordes players in the world, he started spamming units during playtest games and quickly found units that cause issues whereas prior the playtesters had never played that way before so they never caught spam lists as a problem.

Its easy when you make something to test if it works the way you envisioned it, what is much more important is to test when it breaks. And GW obviously doesn't do that.

An armies testing should be 'that guy' writing the most bs degenerate lists he can think of with the codex. Not a beer and pretzel game with 10 random units off the shelf.

Using your example of wraiths. Sure a basic unit has two load outs. But that's not the only things that effect them. There's also 6 dynasties you need to test those two load outs under so thats 12 variations. Then there's stratagems. According to a Russian I know there's 3 strats that effect wraiths, so each loadout now needs to be tested with each dynasty and each strat so thats now 36(? I dunno, I'm gak at maths) tests. Wraiths are also <CORE> so each model or rules that effects them is also going to need tested. You can say the effects of subfactions are minimal but then it wasn't Salamander dreads that destroyed a meta for like 6 months.

This is the effect of piling so many rules on top of each other. The game not only becomes more bloated but it becomes harder and harder to identify problems during testing to the point where it's easier to just release a book, let the public pay to beta test is then release a fix later.

 Sim-Life wrote:
Using your example of wraiths. Sure a basic unit has two load outs. But that's not the only things that effect them. There's also 6 dynasties you need to test those two load outs under so thats 12 variations. Then there's stratagems.

...there's 3 strats that effect wraiths, so each loadout now needs to be tested with each dynasty and each strat so thats now 36(? I dunno, I'm gak at maths) tests. Wraiths are also <CORE> so each model or rules that effects them is also going to need tested. You can say the effects of subfactions are minimal but then it wasn't Salamander dreads that destroyed a meta for like 6 months.

This is the effect of piling so many rules on top of each other. The game not only becomes more bloated but it becomes harder and harder to identify problems during testing to the point where it's easier to just release a book, let the public pay to beta test is then release a fix later.

You don't need to test Mephrit, Sautekh, Nephrekh or Sautekh Wraiths, they are non-issues. Let's say I test a small amount of Wraiths in Nihilakh and spam Wraiths in a Custom Dynasty. I'm probably not going to be surprised by anything Novokh or Szarekhan Wraiths can do, it won't be absurdly much better than both Nihilakh and Custom Dynasty Wraiths.

I don't know what kind of monkey-brained fart could have tested Chaplain Dreads after giving them a rather strong ability and come to the conclusion that the ability should not come with a pts cost increase. How you can test Dreadnoughts without using them in the Dreadnought chapter? Dreadnoughts were not insane in Blood Angels or Black Templars, flamers were not insane Blood Angels or Space Wolves. Dreadnoughts should be spammed in the chapter that obviously buffs them the most with all the requisite Stratagems and Relics, it's painfully obvious.

Stratagems, Relics, and WL traits should be woven into playtesting of various lists as organically as possible. If I'm playing 18 Wraiths you bet I'm going to slap a Cryptek with an overcharger in there and slap as many Strats and buffs on as possible and see if something breaks.

So that leaves what SK can do for them, but SK cannot do anything super unique for them that he cannot do for Skorpekhs, Ophydians or Triarch Praetorians. That combo alone will not break the game, if it happened to be an especially strong combo compared to any of the others then that would be exactly the good kind of synergistic list building you'd want to have in the game, then you can nerf it a little bit in 6 months if everyone keeps copying the same list in competitive 40k (12 months if I had things my way).

This is not me supporting Chapter Tactics as a concept or saying that they don't make it fundamentally impossible for a unit to be balanced across all sub-factions, that's just an obvious cost of Chapter Tactics that only Chapter-based pts costs could change, but that'd be a huge hassle with its own downsides. Risks like flamers being overcosted in the flamer chapter and undercosted in the melee chapter. You could try to play it safe and make the increased costs for flamers be very tiny, but then you're still not making flamers worth taking on the melee chapter a significant amount of the time and you might as well have made Chapter Tactics less impactful, which is why I have cheered every time a book has been released with relatively weak chapter tactics.

According to a Russian I know...

I chuckled.

 Sim-Life wrote:


Of course it doesn't help when you have people like Jake who think that "more rules = more fluffy" and want to apparently balance the game by being additive instead of subtractive.

More rules isn't automatically more fluffy.

But more rules create greater potential to reflect a larger collection of stories on the table. And it's almost an undeniable fact.

It does mess with game balance, I'll be the first to admit it, Your analysis of the difficulties of play testing wraiths is spot on. For me, story potential is a must and balance is nice to have. For most people, balance is a must and story potential is nice to have. It's just a different approach to the game.

And I get it: I'm fortunate enough to have a group of like minded players, and that's the only reason that I am able to take the approach to this game that I do.

By the way, what did I do to you to p!$$ you off so much that you'll go out of your way to burn me? I've started referencing other people recently, but I usually do it when I reference the parts of their POV with which I agree. Unit and I have had conversations where we managed to find some common ground despite wildly different points of view, and I've found myself agreeing with a lot things HBMC's been saying lately too.

I may have referenced you a couple times, and pointed out that we want different things out of our game, but I do my best to see the validity of your arguments within the context of what it is that you want from the game. Here's a fun exercise. Count the number of times in this post that I have respectfully acknowledged and validated your point of view and then go find any response you've ever made to me that goes as far to find common ground.

If you find one, direct link me to it, or better yet, quote it back so that everyone including me can see that you aren't always as antagonistic as you sometimes seem to be.

Edit: Walked back some of my knee jerk reaction... Diplomacy again.

Just for my 0.02 as a narrative player...

I would rather have balance first and then be able to riff custom rules for my narrative off a balanced base.

A game that is imbalanced to start with means you have to do more work to balance it before you can begin to understand the impact of rules changes made by the organizer.

Why not just go back to how it was.
Ge makes their rules that are geared toward a less tournament style game play.
Then have indipendent originization make their tournament rules, and have GW sponsor said organization.

That gives the people who just wanna have a fun, non sweaty game, get their rules for GW.
Tournament and competative play still exists with officially recognized 3rd party tournament rules, and because GW would sponsor them, it would would give them validity to be recognized by the tournament community and offer separate data sheets for them

For example narrative / casual play could bring back the things that were a lot more thematic like templates facings, armor vulues things like that, but then official tournament data sheets that just operate as if it was now. No facings, no av, ECT ECT.

This way GW could balance one aspect of the game without effecting the other.