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If you had to choose who would write the rules for the NFL next year, and it was between a group of former Super Bowl winners and a group of people who chose their team based on their favorite animal or color, which would you pick?
That assumes GW game is somehow complex and hard to figure out. It's not. Broken comboes are found with elementary school level intelligence.
GW games are broken because it suits GW. It helps sales when tournament try-hards pretend to be competive(lol) and chase newest meta buying new armies chasing the newest hotness(and some even think they are somehow special for figuring out what's broken when GW makes it damn obvious what's broken).
It's pointless to wonder who is best for making game balanced when rules are done by side which has vested interest in game NOT being balanced. Balance would be super bad for GW as players would focus on improving on their play rather than buying newest hotness to stay on power level.
I'm sure all 8 people who do that are very profitable for GW, yes. The fact that one thing being extremely good relative to everything else suppresses sales on said everything else is surely not relevant at all.
And before someone tries to claim "well you could do both man! It's not one or the other", how many changes to come out of the competitive scene have ever made the game more reflective of the lore or weren't just fixing problems that competitive players themselves created? Because I struggle to think of any casual/narrative players even contemplating things like "oops all hive tyrants".
Basically every single casual player I have ever met across any system I have played or even looked into has built their army/list around "how do I take the most possible of the models I like best?"
You stopped before you got to the part where they then whine about losing despite their army not making any sense and beg for nerfs on what ever army they lost to.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2022/02/02 18:23:25
Tyel wrote: 5000 players influencing how the game works has to be compared with... what? Half a dozen or so people deciding how the game works?
Half a dozen people that only play fluffhammer and wonder why nobody took certain models because "look how cool they are!".
As opposed to half a dozen people that only play tourneyhammer and are only highly placed because of attending ungodly numbers of events(seriously, when do these people actually work? what do they do for a living?) and wonder why nobody took certain models because "why would you ever waste points"?
Yup, and those people have a much better idea of how to balance the game than people playing models because they look cool. The guy who just won LVO for the second time is a teacher's aid at FSU and doing his masters...
Edit- forgot I'm talking to the guy who thinks power level is the ultimate balancing system for 40k. Carry on, obviously nothing I say at this point is going to change your mind
LOOOOL he actually believes that? That explains his posts
If you had to choose who would write the rules for the NFL next year, and it was between a group of former Super Bowl winners and a group of people who chose their team based on their favorite animal or color, which would you pick?
I'd choose the men made of straw and rosy-coloured herrings.
Games Workshop Delenda Est.
Users on ignore- 53.
If you break apart my or anyone else's posts line by line I will not read them.
And before someone tries to claim "well you could do both man! It's not one or the other", how many changes to come out of the competitive scene have ever made the game more reflective of the lore or weren't just fixing problems that competitive players themselves created? Because I struggle to think of any casual/narrative players even contemplating things like "oops all hive tyrants".
Basically every single casual player I have ever met across any system I have played or even looked into has built their army/list around "how do I take the most possible of the models I like best?"
With regards to casual play yeah, I'm not disputing or denying that.
That's how I write my casual lists. But if your point is in reference to my comment on "oops all tyrants", I have never seen a casual player intentionally spam one and only one specific unit.
I've seen all Dread lists, all terminator lists, all stompy nids lists, guard armor company, etc but those are more about a theme rather than a specific overturned unit.
I have one friend that loves battlesuits. He has at least one of every variant of battlesuit. Is it oppressive to play against if you're not prepared? Absolutely, which is why after the first couple times he flattened our other friend with it he stopped using it without asking his opponent prior permission.
But my overall point is that a narrative player obviously wants units to reflect the lore because they play to create a 40k story. But a casual player also benefits more from the same philosophy because if they selection criteria is "what units do I like" and those units don't behave how they are supposed to on the table, then it's a very frustrating and disappointing experience.
But ultimately, casual players fall between narrative and competitive in that they'd likely be turned off by overabundance of stimulationist elements but equally disappointed by a unit they love being balanced into indistinguishable mush.
I'll say that all the "whales" I know are casual players. That might be a local thing, but its the observation. Theres a local guy whos dropped about $20k into Orks over the past couple years alone - he only plays a few times a year and never in tournaments or competitive events. In my case I'm spending around $1k/month on average (though in december I spent around $4k to get 2-4 copies of each battleforce box). Likewise the others I know investing significant dollar sums into GW products are guys that don't play in tournaments.
The competitive players I know? With one exception (a guy who rotates armies annually and thus drops about $1-1.5k once per year to buy and build a new army) mostly stick with their existing collections and don't buy much. They have their chosen faction or factions, and their usual purchasing is going to be updated rulebooks, the occasional faction dice set, and some new minis when relevant. They are not regularly pulling out their wallets to buy new miniatures because they have no real reason to, they overwhelmingly commit to just 1-2 factions and will generally stick to a single build/slight variations of a list while they dial-in the competitive list they intend to use for an extended stretch of time on a tournament circuit. They are not regularly shaking things up and dramatically restructuring their armies or chasing the latest hotness with a flavor of the month army - while that may have been the trend in the past when there were only 2-4 codexes released in a given year, GWs release schedule these days moves too quickly for players to meaningfully keep up with it.
Mind you, not all casuals are whales (far from it, the majority are not) and not all competitive gamers are cheap, but the idea that competitive gamers somehow have greater purchasing power than the casual crowd is fiction, especially keeping in mind that competitive gamers make up somewhere between 0.1% and 5% of GWs total customer base.
CoALabaer wrote: Wargamers hate two things: the state of the game and change.
The thing is how does a casual player prove to GW their experience and understanding? There's no test, exam, performance grades, metrics or anything to measure them by.
EXCEPT the competitive event system. That's the metric people's skill in the game is measured by and those who run the competitive system (judges etc....) have also had to prove their worth in that system
The average casual player has no metrics to show GW why GW should pay attention to them. The most easy, simple and quick method is for GW to pair with competitive event organisers, judges and players because there's at least a base line of proven metrics for those groups. If the casual player wants to prove themselves then, right now, they have to enter that same system of eventing.
Because you still don't understand what a casual or narrative player is, or what they want.
As a casual/narrative player I couldn't care less about knife edge tournament balance, "interesting" list building choices, or tactical gotcha-traps.
I just want my units to feel like they accurately reflect their lore and that, should two people decide to play a pickup game, every game doesn't end up with one side steamrolling the other.
If you have some bad matchups where player A brings pure gunline and player B brings foot slogging melee, then adjust/add more terrain or change to a scenario that slightly advantages the disadvantaged player.
But I would 100% of the time prefer someone passionate about the setting and the hobby writing a wonky but whimsical ruleset over a diehard number-cruncher writing a soulless "chess but with gothic hats" competitive game.
Because the vast majority of people that know about or engage with 40k, do so because of the aesthetic and setting/lore. That's pretty unarguable given the number of people who only consume the games, books, and fan content or paint but don't play. So I would much rather the game do a good job of reflecting that than some forced, tortured conception of a gentleman's duel.
And before someone tries to claim "well you could do both man! It's not one or the other", how many changes to come out of the competitive scene have ever made the game more reflective of the lore or weren't just fixing problems that competitive players themselves created? Because I struggle to think of any casual/narrative players even contemplating things like "oops all hive tyrants".
In theory a balanced competitive system for a wargame aims to give you exactly what you want. A situation where two opposing armies can have a decent chance of winning. Yes there will be bad choices in that and good choices. If you decide to bring an entire army of termagaunts with almost no synapse beyond the minimum then yes its going to break because you are so far outside of the expected. However in theory a good balanced system won't have huge swings of balance between good and well build armies.
The issue comes when people who are influential want not a competitive balanced game, but an easy win. When they push for unbalanced systems. That has less to do with competitive vs casual and more the attitude and maturity of the person.
So I want to open by apologizing for my tone being overly heated in my last post.
That said, if what you took from my message was "a robust competitive system would do you good" then I either did a poor job explaining or you did a poor job listening.
I'd much rather the designers ignore all thoughts of balance and first focus on making all the armies, units, wargear, mechanics, etc feel like they are depicting a reasonable abstraction of a well written/directed 40k book/show. Then, and only after that's done, thinking about how two people selecting things off a list is supposed to be approaching balance.
Because when you do that in reverse you start seeing the designers compromise the identity of units or the thematic function of rules purely to try and pull a bunch of disparate concepts into some state of gameplay equilibrium.
I'd much rather have a moderately unbalanced game where the players adjust on their end through board set up or scenario selection, if it means the units actually feel like the universe that made me interested in this game to begin with.
I do get what you mean and I think that its not a case of one before nor after the other; but rather a case of side by side when it comes to the "feel" of a unit. The trick is to balance them both on their own and within the army so that they have the right feel but aren't broken. The problem is the lore presents most things in a broken state for tabletop.
Eldar Snipers can shoot you from the other side of the street without missing; Marines can shrug off almost any damage; Termagaunts will be deployed and die in their tens of thousands etc...
Carrying a "feel" is also a very personal thing I think. Some people only need the Eldar Ranger to have a longish range and few shots to feel like a sniper. They don't have to lean into the extremes - which is often where issues are with balance.
Also "feel" can be affected by the model, the painting, the terrain, the setup for the game and the opponent. There's so many bits to the feel of an army and even the same person can feel like their army is different between game experiences even if the stats remain the same.
So yes I'm sure the snipers will be snipers; the marines will bring fewer models than the tyranids (unless they are going nid-zillah) etc... I think the only way to remove all identity would be if the game wound up with each model being the same between armies. So each sniper has the same stats; each infantry etc.... and there ARE game systems like that and they work well. However I don't think GW will ever approach that outside of games like Adepticus Titanicus (in its current form at least) where its more a result of them having only one faction as opposed to making the game totally even balance wise.
chaos0xomega wrote: I'll say that all the "whales" I know are casual players. That might be a local thing, but its the observation. Theres a local guy whos dropped about $20k into Orks over the past couple years alone - he only plays a few times a year and never in tournaments or competitive events. In my case I'm spending around $1k/month on average (though in december I spent around $4k to get 2-4 copies of each battleforce box). Likewise the others I know investing significant dollar sums into GW products are guys that don't play in tournaments.
The competitive players I know? With one exception (a guy who rotates armies annually and thus drops about $1-1.5k once per year to buy and build a new army) mostly stick with their existing collections and don't buy much. They have their chosen faction or factions, and their usual purchasing is going to be updated rulebooks, the occasional faction dice set, and some new minis when relevant. They are not regularly pulling out their wallets to buy new miniatures because they have no real reason to, they overwhelmingly commit to just 1-2 factions and will generally stick to a single build/slight variations of a list while they dial-in the competitive list they intend to use for an extended stretch of time on a tournament circuit. They are not regularly shaking things up and dramatically restructuring their armies or chasing the latest hotness with a flavor of the month army - while that may have been the trend in the past when there were only 2-4 codexes released in a given year, GWs release schedule these days moves too quickly for players to meaningfully keep up with it.
Mind you, not all casuals are whales (far from it, the majority are not) and not all competitive gamers are cheap, but the idea that competitive gamers somehow have greater purchasing power than the casual crowd is fiction, especially keeping in mind that competitive gamers make up somewhere between 0.1% and 5% of GWs total customer base.
Competitive players definitely jump armies, but there's so many variables to make it impossible to assess.
How much is second hand?
How much is printed?
How much is borrowed?
How much is a massive collection from winning tournaments?
Here's people sorted by their WR in 9th edition and then all their armies they played before 9th edition ( for people who attended at least 5 tournaments )
Spoiler:
And here's the same sorted by # of games:
Spoiler:
As you can see a lot of people who play often already have a deep bench to pull from.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/02/02 20:07:12
chaos0xomega wrote: I'll say that all the "whales" I know are casual players. That might be a local thing, but its the observation. Theres a local guy whos dropped about $20k into Orks over the past couple years alone - he only plays a few times a year and never in tournaments or competitive events. In my case I'm spending around $1k/month on average (though in december I spent around $4k to get 2-4 copies of each battleforce box). Likewise the others I know investing significant dollar sums into GW products are guys that don't play in tournaments.
The competitive players I know? With one exception (a guy who rotates armies annually and thus drops about $1-1.5k once per year to buy and build a new army) mostly stick with their existing collections and don't buy much. They have their chosen faction or factions, and their usual purchasing is going to be updated rulebooks, the occasional faction dice set, and some new minis when relevant. They are not regularly pulling out their wallets to buy new miniatures because they have no real reason to, they overwhelmingly commit to just 1-2 factions and will generally stick to a single build/slight variations of a list while they dial-in the competitive list they intend to use for an extended stretch of time on a tournament circuit. They are not regularly shaking things up and dramatically restructuring their armies or chasing the latest hotness with a flavor of the month army - while that may have been the trend in the past when there were only 2-4 codexes released in a given year, GWs release schedule these days moves too quickly for players to meaningfully keep up with it.
Mind you, not all casuals are whales (far from it, the majority are not) and not all competitive gamers are cheap, but the idea that competitive gamers somehow have greater purchasing power than the casual crowd is fiction, especially keeping in mind that competitive gamers make up somewhere between 0.1% and 5% of GWs total customer base.
Competitive players definitely jump armies, but there's so many variables to make it impossible to assess.
How much is second hand?
How much is printed?
How much is borrowed?
How much is a massive collection from winning tournaments?
Here's people sorted by their WR in 9th edition and then all their armies they played before 9th edition ( for people who attended at least 5 tournaments )
Spoiler:
And here's the same sorted by # of games:
Spoiler:
As you can see a lot of people who play often already have a deep bench to pull from.
The problem with pulling the ITC data here is it doesn't give us great context in terms of time. IIRC the system has been kicking around since 2014 or so, so you're potentially looking at a new army every 2-3 years for most of the people on the list (depending on how far back that goes) which isn't anything particularly notable, especially not compared to the "flavor of the month" era where competitive players were (supposedly) jumping to a new faction every 3-6 months.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/02/02 21:41:00
CoALabaer wrote: Wargamers hate two things: the state of the game and change.
