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 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Mezmorki wrote:

The other factor is, I truly believe, the streamlining and simplification of the core rules. Simplification of morale, removal of vehicles, eliminations of restrictions for firing and target selections, etc. all reduce the avenues for counter-play and generalship that previously created openings for different units to play an impactful role on the battlefield. This in turn makes the game even more of a numbers game than it already was. If there is no avenue for counte rplay, all I can do is hope that I can statistically put out more fire than you and roll well enough to get ahead.

Exactly this, the dumbing down of gameplay until only two battlefield roles remain: be good at standing in circles or be good at removing things from circles.

This is the cost of streamlining and making the game as accessible as possible. Everything has a cost, and the cost here is you get very simplified and easy missions.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Assymetrical stuff is fine...if both players play the game twice and switch sides. They're otherwise hugely impractical for tournaments. What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?

Few things going on...

First - we should talk about what direction we're coming at this from.

I'm thinking about balance from a non-tournament perspective, and lamenting that tournament-style play and attitudes have taken over what was once more casual. From this more casual perspective, "balance" is more about having a feeling that my win's and losses will average out over time. Some missions I'll be favored to win, others I'll loose, but "winning" isn't the driving call to play. If all casual play is shoehorned into a competitive ITC format, those army lists that excel in that format will routinely win over and over against armies that aren't well positioned for it. That's the issue I see.

Next is the matter of balance in a tournament-format. If people want to play defined missions and list-build around a tournament mission pack, go right ahead. That's totally fine and no one is stopping anyone from doing that.

I DO, however, wonder about what a slightly less-competitive tournament format could look like with there being a more diverse mission pool and a way for players iteratively select a mission that both sides find agreeable. Rather than strict wins and loses, points could be awarded based on margin's of victory determined by the missions and normalized over the course of the tournament. Just a side thought...

Thirdly - the point of all of this mission design stuff IS to impact list construction as well. "What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?" I'd argue that players should considered the "what if" of having to hold a bunker during list construction, along with all the other what ifs that the missions might require. A more diverse mission pool would INTEND to erode the ability to optimize a list towards a narrow set of objectives. By forcing players to consider these what-ifs, it has the knock on effect of forcing more TAC style of lists IMHO.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 auticus wrote:
This is the cost of streamlining and making the game as accessible as possible.

I agree with that intent/desire in theory. In practice, I don't think 40K has ever been more convoluted and challenging. The core rules are fairly simple, but codexes are incredibly dense and rule overhead of the game has grown considerably IMHO.

 Mezmorki wrote:

I'm thinking about balance from a non-tournament perspective, and lamenting that tournament-style play and attitudes have taken over what was once more casual. From this more casual perspective, "balance" is more about having a feeling that my win's and losses will average out over time. Some missions I'll be favored to win, others I'll loose, but "winning" isn't the driving call to play. If all casual play is shoehorned into a competitive ITC format, those army lists that excel in that format will routinely win over and over against armies that aren't well positioned for it. That's the issue I see.

Define casual.

Because as I understand it, "casual" encompasses a massive and broad spectrum, from pick-up games with strangers to friendly games in a well established communities to narrative games.

 Mezmorki wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Assymetrical stuff is fine...if both players play the game twice and switch sides. They're otherwise hugely impractical for tournaments. What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?

Few things going on...

First - we should talk about what direction we're coming at this from.

I'm thinking about balance from a non-tournament perspective, and lamenting that tournament-style play and attitudes have taken over what was once more casual. From this more casual perspective, "balance" is more about having a feeling that my win's and losses will average out over time. Some missions I'll be favored to win, others I'll loose, but "winning" isn't the driving call to play. If all casual play is shoehorned into a competitive ITC format, those army lists that excel in that format will routinely win over and over against armies that aren't well positioned for it. That's the issue I see.

Next is the matter of balance in a tournament-format. If people want to play defined missions and list-build around a tournament mission pack, go right ahead. That's totally fine and no one is stopping anyone from doing that.

I DO, however, wonder about what a slightly less-competitive tournament format could look like with there being a more diverse mission pool and a way for players iteratively select a mission that both sides find agreeable. Rather than strict wins and loses, points could be awarded based on margin's of victory determined by the missions and normalized over the course of the tournament. Just a side thought...

I guess I'm confused. Crusade has asymmetrical missions that seem to fit what you're looking for.

Thirdly - the point of all of this mission design stuff IS to impact list construction as well. "What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?" I'd argue that players should considered the "what if" of having to hold a bunker during list construction, along with all the other what ifs that the missions might require. A more diverse mission pool would INTEND to erode the ability to optimize a list towards a narrow set of objectives. By forcing players to consider these what-ifs, it has the knock on effect of forcing more TAC style of lists IMHO.

I don't know if this is practical given some armies are just different overall. Lists have been pretty TAC in my eyes. Knights don't use four superheavies, people rarely take massed anti-tank, melee and ranged units are useful, and so on.

Casual, to me, is both attitude and list.

List is easy. It's basically putting together a list where, for whatever reason, the overriding imperative is NOT to maximize or over emphasize its power and expected potential to win. It could be someone starting out in the hobby and they just bought units they like. It could be someone trying to run a fluffy list with no eye towards being particularly competitive. It could be someone taking a list they think we will perform well, but they aren't trying to chase or respond to any particular meta. It could be just a matter of simply not deciding to overly optimize unit selection and options.

Attitude for casual play is more about playing to make sure everyone has FUN, and feels like they are in the running, rather than just playing to win. This may mean doing things with your units that are suboptimal in-game just in order to make a more narrative moment or give a minor concession to your opponent.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Casual, to me, is both attitude and list.

List is easy. It's basically putting together a list where, for whatever reason, the overriding imperative is NOT to maximize or over emphasize its power and expected potential to win. It could be someone starting out in the hobby and they just bought units they like. It could be someone trying to run a fluffy list with no eye towards being particularly competitive. It could be someone taking a list they think we will perform well, but they aren't trying to chase or respond to any particular meta. It could be just a matter of simply not deciding to overly optimize unit selection and options.

Attitude for casual play is more about playing to make sure everyone has FUN, and feels like they are in the running, rather than just playing to win. This may mean doing things with your units that are suboptimal in-game just in order to make a more narrative moment or give a minor concession to your opponent.

That is a bridge too far for many...

Which is sad.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Casual, to me, is both attitude and list.

List is easy. It's basically putting together a list where, for whatever reason, the overriding imperative is NOT to maximize or over emphasize its power and expected potential to win. It could be someone starting out in the hobby and they just bought units they like. It could be someone trying to run a fluffy list with no eye towards being particularly competitive. It could be someone taking a list they think we will perform well, but they aren't trying to chase or respond to any particular meta. It could be just a matter of simply not deciding to overly optimize unit selection and options.

Attitude for casual play is more about playing to make sure everyone has FUN, and feels like they are in the running, rather than just playing to win. This may mean doing things with your units that are suboptimal in-game just in order to make a more narrative moment or give a minor concession to your opponent.

I think that is about where I land with it too. But yeah... someone that is very competitive is never going to see things like that or want to participate in something like that.

And I think thats ok. But depending on your community if they are all like that (like mine was) that is going to push you out. But them's the breaks I suppose.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Assymetrical stuff is fine...if both players play the game twice and switch sides. They're otherwise hugely impractical for tournaments. What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?

Then your opponent knowingly built an army that can't play as well to one of the known missions and you have the advantage. Is that actually a problem? You wouldn't build a list with no mobile units and no obsec and then complain that you can't play missions with progressive scoring.

Frankly, it sounds like the game some competitive players want is a single fixed mission with a single fixed battlefield layout laid out in the rulebook, just to make absolutely certain that everything about the 40K Competitive Experience is completely predictable ahead of time and can be ruthlessly optimized without having to prepare for any contingency besides what list your opponent brought. And more power to them if that's really the kind of game they want; but it sucks for the rest of us when the core game doesn't even have attackers and defenders (let alone varied objectives) because traditional tournament formats can't handle it.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Casual, to me, is both attitude and list.

List is easy. It's basically putting together a list where, for whatever reason, the overriding imperative is NOT to maximize or over emphasize its power and expected potential to win. It could be someone starting out in the hobby and they just bought units they like. It could be someone trying to run a fluffy list with no eye towards being particularly competitive. It could be someone taking a list they think we will perform well, but they aren't trying to chase or respond to any particular meta. It could be just a matter of simply not deciding to overly optimize unit selection and options.

Attitude for casual play is more about playing to make sure everyone has FUN, and feels like they are in the running, rather than just playing to win. This may mean doing things with your units that are suboptimal in-game just in order to make a more narrative moment or give a minor concession to your opponent.

There's a pretty big range of people at tournaments. I'd say at least 20% at bigger tournaments are literally just there to roll dice and have fun, win or lose.

Frankly, it sounds like the game some competitive players want is a single fixed mission with a single fixed battlefield layout laid out in the rulebook, just to make absolutely certain that everything about the 40K Competitive Experience is completely predictable ahead of time and can be ruthlessly optimized without having to prepare for any contingency besides what list your opponent brought.

I agree with that thought, especially after years of being screamed at for non traditional scenarios for that very reason.

For the same reason random elements are taboo. If you can't optimize ahead of time for it, its seen as bad or a waste of time because thats testing reactionary skills which is a completely different set of skills that the modern game pushes.

The more actually DIFFERENT scenarios you have, the harder it is to optimize for them all which means the harder it is to lean hard on a traditional skewed list.

Which is no surprise to me that the scenarios in 40k have largely been about the same type of thing only dressed different to give the illusion of a variety of mission types.

40k is as much pivotal around building a list and seeing how that combination works in a static set of parameters as it is about the gameplay during the game, if not more so for many many people.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Casual, to me, is both attitude and list.

List is easy. It's basically putting together a list where, for whatever reason, the overriding imperative is NOT to maximize or over emphasize its power and expected potential to win. It could be someone starting out in the hobby and they just bought units they like. It could be someone trying to run a fluffy list with no eye towards being particularly competitive. It could be someone taking a list they think we will perform well, but they aren't trying to chase or respond to any particular meta. It could be just a matter of simply not deciding to overly optimize unit selection and options.

Attitude for casual play is more about playing to make sure everyone has FUN, and feels like they are in the running, rather than just playing to win. This may mean doing things with your units that are suboptimal in-game just in order to make a more narrative moment or give a minor concession to your opponent.

I’m going to slightly disagree with my main point here by stating I don’t think mission designed in 9th is the problem.

I think you are conflating people’s natural desire to win with issues in mission design. As stated, there are plenty of crusade missions that are much more narratively driven and can be asymmetric in both scoring, and board setup. Many people don’t play these at all, and those that do usually only do it every once in a while as breath of fresh air from the usual matchplay missions.

Do the mission designs favor certain armies? Of course, but that’s always going be the case. End of game scoring missions favor armies that can kill effectively. Maelstrom missions favored armies with excellent mobility over armies with less good options. Asymmetrical missions favor armies that better fill their conditions.

However, It’s not the missions that are forcing people to play competitively, it’s because they want to win. When talking about 8th being more balanced than 9th people’s main counterpoint was “yeah but what about all these soup lists?” Literally all you needed to do to stop these was just agree with your opponent to play mono-book armies, but this rarely happened. Why? Because unlike what you and many posters on here claim, most people playing games are there to primarily to test their skill and army builds. Not build a story or use luck to determine a winner. If a mission design changes to one of your suggested models, then people will just restructure their armies to better take advantage of them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
To those asking what evidence I have 9th is less balanced than 8th, it’s mainly due to LVO winrates. Look Peter the Falcons 2019 article on that years LVO winrate (2018 ITC season). In that article he has chart showing lists that had a certain armies winrates. The highest faction with any play % was Ynnari at just sub 60%. Those dreaded knight soup builds had a 55% winrate. Guard had a 52% winrate,

Admittedly things got worse post SM 2.0. That said a lot of you are overrating how bad it was simply because SM are more common than the more dominant factions of this edition. For example, pre-nerf ironhands had basically the same winrate as pre-nerf DE. Most SM chapters had worse winrates than Custodes, Tau, and Tyranids had this past weekend. And let’s also remember that the 2.0 era only lasted 3/4 of year, not even 1/4 of 8th’s life span.

And remember that those of you saying that’s just competitive winrates, it is as perfectly fine for you and your opponent to agree not to soup.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Mezmorki wrote:

The other factor is, I truly believe, the streamlining and simplification of the core rules. Simplification of morale, removal of vehicles, eliminations of restrictions for firing and target selections, etc. all reduce the avenues for counter-play and generalship that previously created openings for different units to play an impactful role on the battlefield. This in turn makes the game even more of a numbers game than it already was. If there is no avenue for counte rplay, all I can do is hope that I can statistically put out more fire than you and roll well enough to get ahead.

Exactly this, the dumbing down of gameplay until only two battlefield roles remain: be good at standing in circles or be good at removing things from circles.

I don't think 40k has ever been smarter than that.

I won't enter in the balance discussion.

But about the mission discussion: 9th missions are ITC missions with some tweaks.

In 8th theres a reason why outside of america not many people played ITC missions. I tried some ITC spanish tournaments and didn't liked them at all.

And thats the bigger reason why I cannot enjoy 9th, because I enjoyed 8th even having worse rules for my armies and the game being as streamlined as 9th.

And is not something I can point out to ITC style missions to say why I don't enjoy them or find less enjoyable than the last incarnations of malestrom missions. But I do. And many of my friends feel the same.

 catbarf wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
Orks currently have 74 datasheets available for play. Two thirds of that is ~49. Show me a single codex in the game that has ever had that many datasheets show up top tournament lists in any edition.

Do you feel that every datasheet in the codex is on the same level as the ones that had to be hard-limited, or are you missing the actual point, which was that aircraft and buggies doing great does not mean everything in the codex is doing equally great, and internal balance is still a concern?

There are tournament winning lists without a single buggy or plane. This is alone is sufficient proof to debunk your argument.

Buggies were limited because of squig buggies, full stop. Planes were not just limited because of orks, but also because of ad mech. Good planes and cheap shooting units that ignore LoS have been a problem all through 8th and 9th, for all sorts of factions, each time for the exact same reason.
The reason why they were spammed was because they reached a critical mass that way. A single squig buggy isn't a more powerful model than a snazzwagon or SJD, but bringing 9 allows you to wipe out your opponent's counters to your army no matter how well they are hidden.

So yes, internal balance is not a concern for orks outside of the troops slot.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
No proof, just yet another person stating their subjective opinion as absolute truth and telling everyone to complain to GW while they complain to dakka.

Statistically we're probably not likely worse off, but I think with the pace of things it gets very difficult to deal with new armies.

Take T'au -- W4/W8 suits with W2 drones that have a 4++. Previously D2 was becoming verboten, but now it might need some sunlight to deal with suits and drones. Trying to puzzle that out while still striking a balance against other armies like Custodes with W5 bikes can be difficult - especially if you're not a Dark Lance army.

We're going to be dealing with GSC, Custodes, T'au, Eldar, and Tyranids all within 3 months worth of time or so. And then we'll have CSM not long thereafter.

It's a ton of info to process.

Yeah, the combination of ridiculous power creep in the last few codices combined with blast-from-the-past balance adjustments doesn't paint a great future for 9th. If they don't change course soon, this is not going to end well for neither competitive nor casual players.

 catbarf wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Assymetrical stuff is fine...if both players play the game twice and switch sides. They're otherwise hugely impractical for tournaments. What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?

Then your opponent knowingly built an army that can't play as well to one of the known missions and you have the advantage. Is that actually a problem? You wouldn't build a list with no mobile units and no obsec and then complain that you can't play missions with progressive scoring.

Frankly, it sounds like the game some competitive players want is a single fixed mission with a single fixed battlefield layout laid out in the rulebook, just to make absolutely certain that everything about the 40K Competitive Experience is completely predictable ahead of time and can be ruthlessly optimized without having to prepare for any contingency besides what list your opponent brought. And more power to them if that's really the kind of game they want; but it sucks for the rest of us when the core game doesn't even have attackers and defenders (let alone varied objectives) because traditional tournament formats can't handle it.

I agree. It's odd when the counter arguments for changing the mission design are "but then each mission would favour different types of army" when that's kind of the point in the first place. It's true that you need to be really careful with the mission design in an system with asymmetry because you can't just create scenarios that are flat-out "this style of army loses".

I think the best approach is something used in a number of games, most notably a couple of FFG's Star Wars miniature games. Each player has cards with deployment maps and missions on them, chosen from a larger set of cards, and these form a pool of options at the start of the game. There's a back-and-forth mechanic of eliminating cards from the pool until you end up with a mission/deployment combination (there's also a third set of cards that may or may not be secondary objectives, can't recall right now). It's quite similar to how pairings work in team tournaments in that there's some control for both sides but rarely total control. So you can choose to bring missions that favour your own army, but you may not actually get to play those in some games so you still need flexibility. The good thing about this system is you don't need a huge number of options to create a large number of possibilities. It also leads to scenarios where both players may generally favour the same mission/deployment combo but you then have to decide whether the specific match-up of players and armies favours your preferred mission or whether you'd have a better chance of winning by coming out of your comfort zone.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
But…sales aren’t declining?

Look at their financials. They’re there for the viewing.

Sales are down in the financials, but they made more money in royalties. It's too early to tell if this is the Covid bubble deflating, or if people are just not happy with the direction of the game and leaving for other things though.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Casual, to me, is both attitude and list.

List is easy. It's basically putting together a list where, for whatever reason, the overriding imperative is NOT to maximize or over emphasize its power and expected potential to win. It could be someone starting out in the hobby and they just bought units they like. It could be someone trying to run a fluffy list with no eye towards being particularly competitive. It could be someone taking a list they think we will perform well, but they aren't trying to chase or respond to any particular meta. It could be just a matter of simply not deciding to overly optimize unit selection and options.

Attitude for casual play is more about playing to make sure everyone has FUN, and feels like they are in the running, rather than just playing to win. This may mean doing things with your units that are suboptimal in-game just in order to make a more narrative moment or give a minor concession to your opponent.

As for attitude, that's not an argument between casual and competitive mindsets. It just depends on the person.
I've played with lots of "WAAC" competitive players who were a joy to play with (the only ones who play by intent, usually) and "fluffy casual" ones who spent the whole 3 hours bitching constantly.

I can't speak for how balanced 9th's missions are exactly, nor will I try to speak to how "fun" people should find them, but I will say that I think the game moving away from killing being the main mode of scoring (with all the killing points options being secondaries) has been a healthier move for the game in a competitive sense..

That said, I get that some people just don't like objective missions. That's always been the case and I can't count the number of times in past editions where the game mode defaulted to 'kill stuff' over playing objective missions because it required less thinking and you could just smash armies into each other and the more efficient one tended to come out on top.

That's not to say the current missions are perfect, but I like the trajectory we're on and GW seems intent on trying to make the game more balanced by tweaking mission design and secondaries regularly which makes for a better competetive game.

That said, sometimes you want to just line up on Dawn of War deployment and mash armies into each other (because that happens even in 40k lore too, after all not every battle is a WWI style affair of trading the same ground back and forth over and over again), which seems better suited to be something for Narrative missions where the balance doesn't have to be as tight because the intent is a good story over a balanced game.

Salt donkey wrote:
To those asking what evidence I have 9th is less balanced than 8th, it’s mainly due to LVO winrates. Look Peter the Falcons 2019 article on that years LVO winrate (2018 ITC season). In that article he has chart showing lists that had a certain armies winrates. The highest faction with any play % was Ynnari at just sub 60%. Those dreaded knight soup builds had a 55% winrate. Guard had a 52% winrate,

I feel soup serves to make quantifying "power" back in 2018 (and then comparing the situation today) significantly more difficult.

For example in the article, 24.81% of lists of that LVO included Guard. 22% included Knights. (Just shy of 10% of lists each for "primary detachment" - but that terminology has always been kind of suspect).
Then you've got about 14% of lists including CWE, DE and 7% Ynnari. But in terms of primary detachment its 4%, 7% and 6% respectively.

So okay - we can say "Armies with a Knight Detachment got a 55% win rate" - but what does that mean? Is someone running your cliched Guard+Knight+Smash Captain build really the same as someone who ran mono knights? Or someone relatively casual who brought along a bunch of unsynergised Tactical Marines and a knight because, why not they look cool?

Further down in that article we get some more interesting facts. If you took the 84 players in the top 150 of the ITC at the LVO, their collective average win rate was 70%. Rising to some 79% against players outside this bracket. The balanced thing would be the variety of lists those 84 ran - almost every faction. And to be fair - most factions got one player to 5-1 or better.

But again - what that means is hard to quantify. So for example only 11.29% of lists with a Guard Primary Detachment went 5-1 or better. But... 32.26% of lists that went 5-1 or better had "some" guard presence. Out of the 43.56% of all Imperial lists that could have souped in Guard. What does that tell us about Guard Power? Is this a loyal 32? Is this 1000+ points? Is it mono Guard with 17 Space Marines?

If we look at the more recent LVO two things step out.
First - there's probably a greater concentration at the top. In terms of getting 4 wins there is very widespread factions. But at 5+ wins, Custodes, DE and Tyranids clearly stand out - with most other factions only getting 1 or a handful through (4 Orks, 5 GK.). But this might actually be fairer than saying "X made it" because they were the largest detachment in a soup list.
Second - and maybe this is special pleading - but the lack of soup is likely to spike the win % stats. Because there's a cleaner delineation. A DE list is a DE list. It isn't anything from 100% DE, to say 40% DE, 35% Ynnari and 25% CWE (or Harlequins etc). People can presumably build bad DE/Custodes/Tyranid lists - but the pool is potentially lower. As I think the most played faction in this LVO (if we give Space Marines their special flavours) 7% of the field ran Custodes. Compare that with the 24% or 22% of lists having some Guard or Knights above.

Put another way - if you thought (as most competitive players probably did) that Custodes, DE and Tyranids were the factions to beat, they were weirdly unrepresented at the LVO - making up sub 25% of lists. Also Ad Mech did actually win and their faction win rate was only 45%.
Not entirely sure how you'd crunch it - but "Imperial Soup" and "Eldar Soup" were approaching 50%~ of the lists at the 2018/19 LVO. I also think that meta had been in place for about 6 months and had become somewhat hardboiled as a result. The lists that worked (and in turn, the lists that worked against the lists that worked) had largely been in place for six months. By comparison I feel the LVO meta was very different to say the situation in July 2021 - and its been reset again last week.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
But…sales aren’t declining?

Look at their financials. They’re there for the viewing.

Sales are down in the financials, but they made more money in royalties. It's too early to tell if this is the Covid bubble deflating, or if people are just not happy with the direction of the game and leaving for other things though.

Revenue is up. Profit is down. Which means sales are up.

Profit will fluctuate based on what portion of sales go through FLGS who get product 50% off. When the pandemic hit the only way to buy from GW was their website, which is essentially 99% profit. Profit going down when people are exiting the pandemic ( for now ) and inflation is rising doesn't mean GW is failing.

The half year before the pandemic was 148M. This one was 192M.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

Revenue is up. Profit is down. Which means sales are up.

Costs are also going up across the board in many industries. International shipping in particular can cut into margins pretty quickly.

Slipspace wrote:


I agree. It's odd when the counter arguments for changing the mission design are "but then each mission would favour different types of army" when that's kind of the point in the first place. It's true that you need to be really careful with the mission design in an system with asymmetry because you can't just create scenarios that are flat-out "this style of army loses".

Back when I played GW GT's in the dark ages, GW came to the tournament with the missions in hand (each mission was different for 6 rounds). As a player, I had no idea what missions, objectives, terrain stuff, or whatever would be in the mission. So I had to build my lists to be as flexible as possible. Now, of course it was possible to hyper specialize and roll some scenarios, but it wasn't foolproof. Also, the overall winner wasn't the one with the most wins/victory points, but that's another discussion.

Point is you played scenarios from the last GT, the rulebook, and whatever supplements had come out to see how your army performed overall.

Later, GW started putting the scenarios in their tournament packs, so people could practice those scenarios, but you still didn't know who you'd be facing, or what terrain might look like.

The more the random element gets strangled out of the game, the less swings you get, and the less the game requires "skill" as a determining factor. There are just more and less optimal choices of what to do with your units now. Pick list, make obvious moves/choices, profit. All in my opinion. And its why I stopped attending tournaments and got off the churn wagon, especially when tournaments were going to be the focus (nod to Crusade as the way things should be baseline).

 Daedalus81 wrote:


Revenue is up. Profit is down. Which means sales are up.

Yeahhhhh, that's not really true.

Profit will fluctuate based on what portion of sales go through FLGS who get product 50% off. When the pandemic hit the only way to buy from GW was their website, which is essentially 99% profit. Profit going down when people are exiting the pandemic ( for now ) and inflation is rising doesn't mean GW is failing.

The half year before the pandemic was 148M. This one was 192M.

But this part is true, and certainly the last part. It's choppy waters on the seas of high finance right now.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
I think the power of some books is a little more difficult to control. DE took quite a few nerfs ( and some dumb buffs ), but kept on ticking, because what makes them run isn't entirely locked behind points.

Custodes, in theory, should be kept in check by -1D stuff, but they're so god damn efficient it doesn't matter.
T'au is running a ton of units that should promote D2, but people probably still dodge it, because of D1. I haven't had the pleasure of playing them yet, but most of the lists look like they just aim to mostly wipe you out as fast as possible.
Nids are running an AoR with book mechanics that they shouldn't have.


With the Custodes points ping pong and the book schedule so clearly awry is seems GW can't stay ahead of the curve. It's very reminiscent of patching video games after release. I do think they have some overarching design decisions, but nothing is ready to test with everything before it.

Fortunately, we do have an outlet with 6 month CA and 3 month slates, but few want to deal with the seesaw if the spikes are going to be this steep.

I think with enough ( calm ) pressure we could perhaps force GW to put point adjustments in the slate until the book releases calm down or they get their internal issues under control.

Except, as demonstrated by the CA and balance sheet we've already had, GW doesn't intend to use CA OR the slate to do anything to balance the game.

CA2022 and the Balance Slate arguably made balance WORSE. They didn't do much to curb the most powerful armies, took the legs out from under mid-tier armies, and did nothing to help low tier armies/units.


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 Cruentus wrote:

Slipspace wrote:


I agree. It's odd when the counter arguments for changing the mission design are "but then each mission would favour different types of army" when that's kind of the point in the first place. It's true that you need to be really careful with the mission design in an system with asymmetry because you can't just create scenarios that are flat-out "this style of army loses".

Back when I played GW GT's in the dark ages, GW came to the tournament with the missions in hand (each mission was different for 6 rounds). As a player, I had no idea what missions, objectives, terrain stuff, or whatever would be in the mission. So I had to build my lists to be as flexible as possible. Now, of course it was possible to hyper specialize and roll some scenarios, but it wasn't foolproof. Also, the overall winner wasn't the one with the most wins/victory points, but that's another discussion.

Point is you played scenarios from the last GT, the rulebook, and whatever supplements had come out to see how your army performed overall.

Later, GW started putting the scenarios in their tournament packs, so people could practice those scenarios, but you still didn't know who you'd be facing, or what terrain might look like.

The more the random element gets strangled out of the game, the less swings you get, and the less the game requires "skill" as a determining factor. There are just more and less optimal choices of what to do with your units now. Pick list, make obvious moves/choices, profit. All in my opinion. And its why I stopped attending tournaments and got off the churn wagon, especially when tournaments were going to be the focus (nod to Crusade as the way things should be baseline).

Randomness is almost always anti-skill. The 'swings' are what hand weaker players victories. The more 'swings' there are, the less likely it is that 'who is the better player' will determine the victor.

The common counter argument is that skill is demonstrated by dealing with adversity, but that's only true in the incredibly narrow area where the amount of adversity faced is less than or equal to the skill difference between the two players. If you bring a mechanized infantry army against knights in what ends up being a pure killpoint match(oldschool, where it was 1 unit=1 kill point and nothing else mattered), there's no real way to win that. If the scenario has randomized points values for objectives (which GW missions have had in the past) and your opponent rolls all maximum values and you roll all minimum, you'd need to score multiple TIMES more objective than your opponent. You skill would be largely irrelevant.

Also, people say 'oh, the correct moves are obvious' and then proceed to very rarely make the correct moves.

Tyel wrote:

The issue right now for external balance is that GW has spun the rules reset again and so certain codexes which kind of worked with multi-chapter builds are now wanting. GW should release points updates to recognise this reality. But they need data.

What they really need is not data but actually well working brains, how dumb it is to pile nerf on nerf on nerf on SoB as a very good example of an army that wasn't even Top Tier but is strongly affected by the no mixed chapters rule is so painfully obvious, if Grey Knights would be broken i would immediately suspect Matt Ward is back.

Hecaton wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 Mezmorki wrote:

The other factor is, I truly believe, the streamlining and simplification of the core rules. Simplification of morale, removal of vehicles, eliminations of restrictions for firing and target selections, etc. all reduce the avenues for counter-play and generalship that previously created openings for different units to play an impactful role on the battlefield. This in turn makes the game even more of a numbers game than it already was. If there is no avenue for counte rplay, all I can do is hope that I can statistically put out more fire than you and roll well enough to get ahead.

Exactly this, the dumbing down of gameplay until only two battlefield roles remain: be good at standing in circles or be good at removing things from circles.

I don't think 40k has ever been smarter than that.

People think that because it took 35 pages to explain how movement worked (not hyperbole, to be able to move a unit from one side of the board to the other used to take 35 pages of rules, which was stupid) and they used to have to roll a 4 instead of a 3 to instantly kill a tank if they were standing in front of it; that previous editions were masterclasses of tactical acumen and strategic decision making.

ERJAK wrote:
Randomness is almost always anti-skill. The 'swings' are what hand weaker players victories. The more 'swings' there are, the less likely it is that 'who is the better player' will determine the victor.

It really depends on the volume of randomness and to what extent it can be mitigated.

The randomness related to mission design is heavily mitigatable. Taking an extreme example, let's suppose there are two missions A and X. One player makes an army that will perform exceptionally well in one mission, but poorly in the other. Depending on what mission is drawn and what their opponent's army is (well suited, not-well suited, or neutral) will determine their success. A strategy could be to make an army that wins mission A 75% of the time, except against other well-suited armies (and then it's a 50% chance). But they then only win Mission X 25% of the time. Or do you make an army that has a good chance (e.g. 50%) of winning regardless of mission drawn and regardless of what the opponent plays. Expand this out to a pool of 5 or 6 fundamentally different styles of missions. Maybe your army is only going to excel at 1-2 or them, versus the more generalized army that has a modest chance at all 5 or 6.

List design can be used as a mitigating factor when it comes to the randomness in the mission setup.







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ERJAK wrote:

People think that because it took 35 pages to explain how movement worked (not hyperbole, to be able to move a unit from one side of the board to the other used to take 35 pages of rules, which was stupid)

What are you even talking about? What 35 pages of rules?

Slipspace wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Assymetrical stuff is fine...if both players play the game twice and switch sides. They're otherwise hugely impractical for tournaments. What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?

Then your opponent knowingly built an army that can't play as well to one of the known missions and you have the advantage. Is that actually a problem? You wouldn't build a list with no mobile units and no obsec and then complain that you can't play missions with progressive scoring.

Frankly, it sounds like the game some competitive players want is a single fixed mission with a single fixed battlefield layout laid out in the rulebook, just to make absolutely certain that everything about the 40K Competitive Experience is completely predictable ahead of time and can be ruthlessly optimized without having to prepare for any contingency besides what list your opponent brought. And more power to them if that's really the kind of game they want; but it sucks for the rest of us when the core game doesn't even have attackers and defenders (let alone varied objectives) because traditional tournament formats can't handle it.

I agree. It's odd when the counter arguments for changing the mission design are "but then each mission would favour different types of army" when that's kind of the point in the first place. It's true that you need to be really careful with the mission design in an system with asymmetry because you can't just create scenarios that are flat-out "this style of army loses".

I think the best approach is something used in a number of games, most notably a couple of FFG's Star Wars miniature games. Each player has cards with deployment maps and missions on them, chosen from a larger set of cards, and these form a pool of options at the start of the game. There's a back-and-forth mechanic of eliminating cards from the pool until you end up with a mission/deployment combination (there's also a third set of cards that may or may not be secondary objectives, can't recall right now). It's quite similar to how pairings work in team tournaments in that there's some control for both sides but rarely total control. So you can choose to bring missions that favour your own army, but you may not actually get to play those in some games so you still need flexibility. The good thing about this system is you don't need a huge number of options to create a large number of possibilities. It also leads to scenarios where both players may generally favour the same mission/deployment combo but you then have to decide whether the specific match-up of players and armies favours your preferred mission or whether you'd have a better chance of winning by coming out of your comfort zone.

You're leaving out that there's a 'bidding system" that determines which deck gets used. i.e. whoever has the fewer points gets to use their own deck.

Ask anyone who plays Star Wars Legion and they'll tell you that plenty of games are won and lost in 'turn 0'. People sacrifice entire units worth of dead points just to secure blue side so they can use their own deck.

MCP has a similar system, each mission has creates two decks of 3 objectives; secures and extracts. The player with priority (i.e. first turn) decides whether they want to use their extract deck or their secure deck. The one they don't choose uses the OTHER player's deck. Then one card is drawn at random from the 3 and that's the mission for that round. That seems like it should be pretty fair but is honestly just another thing to optimize. If your army is predominantly focused on aggressive fighting, you choose center map objectives that force squads into close combat. Even if your opponent's cards are more spread out, you can usually get enough points off the center map to only need a token effort on the spread out objectives.

If your squad is focused on objective control, you take secures and force spread out fights on 4 corners objectives. Extractions generally reward high movement and activation count anyway so you force your opponent's aggressive list to try and match you in speed a lot of the time. Getting priority can be a very significant advantage and a lot of thought goes into exactly what 3 cards to bring in each deck. The decks also aren't necessarily well balanced against each other, secures are generally much more valuable because they don't move like most extractions do AND there are almost twice as many options for secures as their are for extracts. Cases where extracts are more valuable generally revolve around edge cases where certain characters can capture every objective in one turn with shenanigans.


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 Mezmorki wrote:

ERJAK wrote:
Randomness is almost always anti-skill. The 'swings' are what hand weaker players victories. The more 'swings' there are, the less likely it is that 'who is the better player' will determine the victor.

It really depends on the volume of randomness and to what extent it can be mitigated.

The randomness related to mission design is heavily mitigatable. Taking an extreme example, let's suppose there are two missions A and X. One player makes an army that will perform exceptionally well in one mission, but poorly in the other. Depending on what mission is drawn and what their opponent's army is (well suited, not-well suited, or neutral) will determine their success. A strategy could be to make an army that wins mission A 75% of the time, except against other well-suited armies (and then it's a 50% chance). But they then only win Mission X 25% of the time. Or do you make an army that has a good chance (e.g. 50%) of winning regardless of mission drawn and regardless of what the opponent plays. Expand this out to a pool of 5 or 6 fundamentally different styles of missions. Maybe your army is only going to excel at 1-2 or them, versus the more generalized army that has a modest chance at all 5 or 6.

List design can be used as a mitigating factor when it comes to the randomness in the mission setup.







Automatically Appended Next Post:

ERJAK wrote:

People think that because it took 35 pages to explain how movement worked (not hyperbole, to be able to move a unit from one side of the board to the other used to take 35 pages of rules, which was stupid)

What are you even talking about? What 35 pages of rules?

The explanation for how to move all the different unit types in the game from out in the open into a building (which is going to be necessary to move from one side of the board to the other) required you to memorize 35 pages of rules in 7th edition. Dangerous terrain, difficult terrain, jetbikes, monstrous creatures, etc, etc, etc.

AoS tried designing missions like that for a long time and what happens is that around 20% of games end up finishing with 10 minutes of deployment. People still skew, hoping for favorable draws. If they get those good draws against a TAC army or an army with an unfavorable skew, they win pretty much automatically. If they get bad draws against tac armies or against an army that has a more favorable skew, they pretty much always lose. So you end up with a lot of events where the results were: 1. Skew army that got lucky, 2. Tac army that didn't draw skew in the bad missions, 3. Slightly less lucky skew army, 4. Slightly less lucky skew army.

 Gene St. Ealer wrote:


Yeahhhhh, that's not really true.

I do not understand the logic here. They're up 5M from the last half year and those figures are pre price increases.

I also don't really understand why people get mad at business for focusing on "increasing the numbers" and then consider a business failing if the numbers don't hit some imaginary line.

I'll shut up on this now though since we're way off the thread.

ERJAK wrote:
AoS tried designing missions like that for a long time and what happens is that around 20% of games end up finishing with 10 minutes of deployment. People still skew, hoping for favorable draws. If they get those good draws against a TAC army or an army with an unfavorable skew, they win pretty much automatically. If they get bad draws against tac armies or against an army that has a more favorable skew, they pretty much always lose. So you end up with a lot of events where the results were: 1. Skew army that got lucky, 2. Tac army that didn't draw skew in the bad missions, 3. Slightly less lucky skew army, 4. Slightly less lucky skew army.

Was going to post something like this.

Whether in a casual game or a tournament, its not fun to roll up the mission and find one list has a major advantage over the other.
Saying "players should mitigate" is a bit meaningless - because some won't.