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 TwinPoleTheory wrote:
GW business development has been making the right choices for years (as has been evidenced by sales and profits) and they have nothing to do with competitive balance, testing, or tournaments.

That is patently false. Several rules writers have left GW and stated publicly that their hands were tied on certain balancing decisions because the accountants were using rules to push sales of models. What you say would only be true if the rules writers had no influence from higher ups and full autonomy to write the rules as they see fit.

Toofast wrote:

 TwinPoleTheory wrote:
GW business development has been making the right choices for years (as has been evidenced by sales and profits) and they have nothing to do with competitive balance, testing, or tournaments.

That is patently false. Several rules writers have left GW and stated publicly that their hands were tied on certain balancing decisions because the accountants were using rules to push sales of models. What you say would only be true if the rules writers had no influence from higher ups and full autonomy to write the rules as they see fit.

Source?

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

Toofast wrote:

 TwinPoleTheory wrote:
GW business development has been making the right choices for years (as has been evidenced by sales and profits) and they have nothing to do with competitive balance, testing, or tournaments.

That is patently false. Several rules writers have left GW and stated publicly that their hands were tied on certain balancing decisions because the accountants were using rules to push sales of models. What you say would only be true if the rules writers had no influence from higher ups and full autonomy to write the rules as they see fit.

Source?

I'm not going to dig up years old tweets but sure I'll play along. Here's from an article published in Goonhammer...

"So, we all worked on the End Times books, but at the same time we knew that there was work being done behind the scenes, in a locked room, which we were not allowed to go into but could occasionally peek into, where they had a bunch of people like John Blanche, Alan Merrett, we had various higher ups... So then AoS finally left “the room” and came out to us. Jervis Johnson had been working on it in the room, so he headed up the rules design. But he was under a lot of pressure from the other people who had been in that room for a long time where a lot of the decisions had been made about exactly what it was going to be and how it was going to work and what it would have and wouldn’t have, a lot of the decisions had been made above a rules level (remember, it’s miniatures then setting then rules), which then impacted on the rules. "

So Jervis was in a room with the higher ups brainstorming a bunch of ideas for AoS. The other rules writers weren't even allowed in the room during these conversations. Then Jervis sits down with the junior rules writers and says "Ok we're making AoS but it has to be this way and that way, it has to include x, y, and z, because the corporate suits in those closed door meetings demand it for model sales."

This isn't some big secret, it's common knowledge that rules are sometimes written to sell models with balance being an afterthought if they even think about it at all. Guys like James Hewitt in that interview are just confirming what anyone with a half a brain would realize from playing the game for a couple editions and keeping up with the new codexes that get released. It's not some revelation, it's like walking around all day smelling poop and then finding some on the bottom of your shoe.

Toofast wrote:

 TwinPoleTheory wrote:
GW business development has been making the right choices for years (as has been evidenced by sales and profits) and they have nothing to do with competitive balance, testing, or tournaments.

That is patently false. Several rules writers have left GW and stated publicly that their hands were tied on certain balancing decisions because the accountants were using rules to push sales of models. What you say would only be true if the rules writers had no influence from higher ups and full autonomy to write the rules as they see fit.

I think perhaps you're not reading what I wrote the right way or I've failed horribly in communicating, either of which is possible, but in short, I agree with you. Business development is happy, because sales and profits are up (they have been for awhile), this has nothing to do with rules, balance, tournaments, or testing, these decisions are correct from the perspective of business development (sell more stuff, get more customers).

Some other gems from the same interview, AoS became a mess of close combat at the center of the table every game because they literally wrote the entire 4 page core ruleset based only on the models that came in the boxed starter game. Because "that's what we were told to do". In a game with 20 factions and infinite possible army combinations, they based their entire ruleset on a few units from 2 factions in the starter set.

"Now, when you think about the contents of that core box, it is all infantry, with short range weaponry. The only ranged attack in there is the hammers being thrown, so the rules were written around close up engagement with no ranged combat at all. Because that’s what we were told to do.

And it got to this point where there was this sudden mad dash. There was this huge long development period, behind closed doors, and then suddenly, it all had to be done yesterday. And so, there was no time to consider questions like: Right, how does ranged combat work? How does a massed ranged army function? What does it do? How are you dealing with different types of units? Y’know, combined arms… That all became… “just get it done”.

Also, there were two or three edicts from on high which impacted the rules in a big way, and one of them was “Bases don’t count, ignore bases”. Which was weird. But that was the thing they wanted to do because they, the people at the top, said not every model has a base, so we can’t say that bases are a thing. And we don’t want to restrict people’s modelling. There was a big drive at that time to pull the game away from the hands of the gamers, so to speak, and make it more about collecting and modelling.

Especially when then, someone up high then got spooked during that 11th hour dash and said “actually, no. Add in some sudden death mechanics, so that if one side is horribly outnumbered, it has a chance to make a last stand” we said “ok, can we use number of wounds rather than number of models, as one dragon is not outnumbered by three goblins”. “Nope, using wounds is too much like using points, just use number of models”.

And so, our hands were tied. By this very imposing upper team, who had the complete say on everything."

After reading this, it's not surprising at all that GW games are horrible for balance. You have accountants who have never played a game of Warhammer telling the rules writers how to write the rules.

If they FURTHER reduce the cost of ANY Custodes units, can I have your all's books before you burn them in fury?

Toofast wrote:
. . .
After reading this, it's not surprising at all that GW games are horrible for balance. You have accountants who have never played a game of Warhammer telling the rules writers how to write the rules.

I want to be fair to accountants here and say that it's very likely actual accountants had nothing to do with those decisions. But yes, not designer/s either. Some dumb manager who either doesn't play the game or only does so in a very superficial way.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Toofast wrote:
. . .
After reading this, it's not surprising at all that GW games are horrible for balance. You have accountants who have never played a game of Warhammer telling the rules writers how to write the rules.

I want to be fair to accountants here and say that it's very likely actual accountants had nothing to do with those decisions. But yes, not designer/s either. Some dumb manager who either doesn't play the game or only does so in a very superficial way.

I would also add that it has been 7 years since AoS was released and at the time Kirby was leading the company. Now, that's not to say that everything is peachy at GW HQ, but 7 years is a long time in the industry so we have no idea how things are done right now.

GW is a very opaque company and often hard to get recent information from it. I think the last twitter thread was from one of the AT designers that I remember.

Karol wrote:
Really? non of the testers and no one at the studio didn't look at void weavers, specially with the limited number of model combination harlis have, and asked the question "what happens if I take 9 of those".

I can imagine the conversation went something like this:
Guy #1: "Great! We'll make a quick xxx$ as everyone* rushes to buy 9 of them! Good job {fill in name}!" (*everyone being defined as mostly tourney players)
Guy #2: "But.... aren't we making these things horribly broken by doing this?"
Guy #3: "Don't worry about it {fill in name}. It'll only be for a month or two & largely only in tournaments because we'll just "fix" them with the next Balance Slate."
Rest of group: "LoL. Yeah, stupid players, buying the rules effective models right away...."
Some one else: "Plus those idiots actually praise us for releasing these Balance Slates! It's a win/win! We get that sweet sweet sales boost AND everyone thinks we're fixing the game."
Guy #1: "Ok, that about wraps it up. For next meeting everyone think about wich Tyranid unit to do this song & dance with."

I'm fairly sure that the op voidweaver spam wasn't intended. Overlooked, yes, but not intended.

I'm sure the balance dataslate is coming this soon, because they saw the results from adepticon (which is public and wildly seen) and went into crisis control.

Warhammer 40k is never going to be balanced, just due to how many dataslates and rules interactions there are. There will always be a boogeyman, once harlequins get adjusted, it'll just be something else.

40k isn't really designed to be a tournament game, and gw doesn't advertise it as such. They only advertise one of their games as a competitive focused game.

Granted, I would like all the factions to be roughly on the same page.

You are sayinj they are more stupid than most stupid first grader. As even those would see the problem void reavers would be...

ccs wrote:

Karol wrote:
Really? non of the testers and no one at the studio didn't look at void weavers, specially with the limited number of model combination harlis have, and asked the question "what happens if I take 9 of those".

I can imagine the conversation went something like this:
Guy #1: "Great! We'll make a quick xxx$ as everyone* rushes to buy 9 of them! Good job {fill in name}!" (*everyone being defined as mostly tourney players)
Guy #2: "But.... aren't we making these things horribly broken by doing this?"
Guy #3: "Don't worry about it {fill in name}. It'll only be for a month or two & largely only in tournaments because we'll just "fix" them with the next Balance Slate."
Rest of group: "LoL. Yeah, stupid players, buying the rules effective models right away...."
Some one else: "Plus those idiots actually praise us for releasing these Balance Slates! It's a win/win! We get that sweet sweet sales boost AND everyone thinks we're fixing the game."
Guy #1: "Ok, that about wraps it up. For next meeting everyone think about wich Tyranid unit to do this song & dance with."

Automatically Appended Next Post:

tneva82 wrote:
You are sayinj they are more stupid than most stupid first grader. As even those would see the problem void reavers would be...

So what is it? GW is so stupid they couldn't figure it out before they went to print or GW is so insidious they make a diabolical plan to sell a single kit? Gotta pick a lane.

tneva82 wrote:
You are saying they are more stupid than most stupid first grader. As even those would see the problem void reavers would be...

simple empirical evidence says that yes, they are utterly incompetent.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

tneva82 wrote:
You are saying they are more stupid than most stupid first grader. As even those would see the problem void reavers would be...

simple empirical evidence says that yes, they are utterly incompetent.

Even if they maliciously making things OP to sell them they fail at this often enough to still be incompetent at it.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

So what is it? GW is so stupid they couldn't figure it out before they went to print or GW is so insidious they make a diabolical plan to sell a single kit? Gotta pick a lane.

No you don't: Incompetent Malice!

 Insectum7 wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

So what is it? GW is so stupid they couldn't figure it out before they went to print or GW is so insidious they make a diabolical plan to sell a single kit? Gotta pick a lane.

No you don't: Incompetent Malice!

And I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you rotten kids!

Is "rushed, overworked, and underpaid" a viable explanation? Or are we stuck arguing over malice or stupidity?

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Is "rushed, overworked, and underpaid" a viable explanation? Or are we stuck arguing over malice or stupidity?

Stuck with malice and stupidity according to the internet even though it would be pretty hard to both be too stupid to balance the Voidweaver and ALSO make it busted maliciously.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Is "rushed, overworked, and underpaid" a viable explanation? Or are we stuck arguing over malice or stupidity?

Stuck with malice and stupidity according to the internet even though it would be pretty hard to both be too stupid to balance the Voidweaver and ALSO make it busted maliciously.

I don't think that tneva82 (making the stupidity argument) and ccs (making the malice argument) constitute "the internet".

The Eldar codex is a BIG book. I think it's entirely possible that changes to the Voidweaver were made after playtesting, and then never playtested, due to time constraints, similar to the change to the Dark Lance damage profile. Or that it was never sufficiently playtested at all. But that doesn't let gw off of the hook. It just means that the corporate leadership of the company needs to invest more into their rules writing and playtesting staff.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Is "rushed, overworked, and underpaid" a viable explanation? Or are we stuck arguing over malice or stupidity?

Its certainly a factor in the grand scheme of things, But I wonder how rushed overworked and underpayed you have to be to miss the Voidweaver being stupid for 90 points.

Toofast wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

Toofast wrote:

 TwinPoleTheory wrote:
GW business development has been making the right choices for years (as has been evidenced by sales and profits) and they have nothing to do with competitive balance, testing, or tournaments.

That is patently false. Several rules writers have left GW and stated publicly that their hands were tied on certain balancing decisions because the accountants were using rules to push sales of models. What you say would only be true if the rules writers had no influence from higher ups and full autonomy to write the rules as they see fit.

Source?

I'm not going to dig up years old tweets but sure I'll play along. Here's from an article published in Goonhammer...

"So, we all worked on the End Times books, but at the same time we knew that there was work being done behind the scenes, in a locked room, which we were not allowed to go into but could occasionally peek into, where they had a bunch of people like John Blanche, Alan Merrett, we had various higher ups... So then AoS finally left “the room” and came out to us. Jervis Johnson had been working on it in the room, so he headed up the rules design. But he was under a lot of pressure from the other people who had been in that room for a long time where a lot of the decisions had been made about exactly what it was going to be and how it was going to work and what it would have and wouldn’t have, a lot of the decisions had been made above a rules level (remember, it’s miniatures then setting then rules), which then impacted on the rules. "

So Jervis was in a room with the higher ups brainstorming a bunch of ideas for AoS. The other rules writers weren't even allowed in the room during these conversations. Then Jervis sits down with the junior rules writers and says "Ok we're making AoS but it has to be this way and that way, it has to include x, y, and z, because the corporate suits in those closed door meetings demand it for model sales."

This isn't some big secret, it's common knowledge that rules are sometimes written to sell models with balance being an afterthought if they even think about it at all. Guys like James Hewitt in that interview are just confirming what anyone with a half a brain would realize from playing the game for a couple editions and keeping up with the new codexes that get released. It's not some revelation, it's like walking around all day smelling poop and then finding some on the bottom of your shoe.

Do you have any evidence that isn't almost a decade old and coming from pre-reformation GW? How do you explain new models coming out with terrible rules? Can you point out anything that demonstrates such corporate meddling in rules and isn't most easily explained by incompetence?

It is a theory I am willing to be convinced on, but every time I've pushed for actual backing I get stuff that is either out of date, pure speculation, or simply false.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Is "rushed, overworked, and underpaid" a viable explanation? Or are we stuck arguing over malice or stupidity?

Stuck with malice and stupidity according to the internet even though it would be pretty hard to both be too stupid to balance the Voidweaver and ALSO make it busted maliciously.

I don't think that tneva82 (making the stupidity argument) and ccs (making the malice argument) constitute "the internet".

The Eldar codex is a BIG book. I think it's entirely possible that changes to the Voidweaver were made after playtesting, and then never playtested, due to time constraints, similar to the change to the Dark Lance damage profile. Or that it was never sufficiently playtested at all. But that doesn't let gw off of the hook. It just means that the corporate leadership of the company needs to invest more into their rules writing and playtesting staff.

Yeah, corporate is fully capable of influencing design without literally coming in and telling them what units should be good or not. That explanation falls within both razors, and thereby is the default assumption to make.

 Insectum7 wrote:

I want to be fair to accountants here and say that it's very likely actual accountants had nothing to do with those decisions. But yes, not designer/s either. Some dumb manager who either doesn't play the game or only does so in a very superficial way.

Yeah, I play minis games with a bunch of accountants and IRS agents and none of them would feth up things like that.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
It is a theory I am willing to be convinced on, but every time I've pushed for actual backing I get stuff that is either out of date, pure speculation, or simply false.

The goal of business development is to sell new releases to existing customers and bring in new customers, a general directive will exist to this end, but it's not going to dictate things at an individual unit level. Consequently, some will be hit and miss, but the general idea will be to err on the side of making new releases as attractive as possible, thus influencing the rules, this is not a perfect science and misses will occur. But 'sell more to the customer base' and 'bring in new customers' will always be the goal. You're right in that it's not some mustache twirling cabal cackling about retiring on Harlequin sales, but the idea that balance or even competition is anywhere in the business plan is unlikely. Radical deviations will be addressed post release, there's no incentive to spend a lot of time and money on a testing phase that could impact a release schedule.

At the end of the day, you can't argue with the results, GW has enjoyed a lot of success over the past several years, profits and sales are up, the business is expanding into new areas, there's no business imperative to change direction really.

I'd be curious to hear a real business reason for missing a ship date in the interests of game balance, especially for a game that relies so heavily on books printed and kits manufactured months in advance.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Is "rushed, overworked, and underpaid" a viable explanation? Or are we stuck arguing over malice or stupidity?

For the designers, yes. The buck stops with someone, though, and that person is either malicious or stupid.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Do you have any evidence that isn't almost a decade old and coming from pre-reformation GW? How do you explain new models coming out with terrible rules? Can you point out anything that demonstrates such corporate meddling in rules and isn't most easily explained by incompetence?

It is a theory I am willing to be convinced on, but every time I've pushed for actual backing I get stuff that is either out of date, pure speculation, or simply false.

This is goalpost moving.

Provide evidence that the company culture has changed. There were models coming out with terrible rules around the time the quote is describing, as well. The Wraithknight is the other well-known one where corporate just dropped the points value.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Is "rushed, overworked, and underpaid" a viable explanation? Or are we stuck arguing over malice or stupidity?

I'd say "rushed, overworked and underpaid" is a RESULT of malice and/or stupidity, and it happens all the time.

I tend not to blame the actual designers, because they aren't the bosses.

I think the modern trend has been that new models have underwhelming rules. People had aneurisms over Eradicators when the previews started, but if the Primaris' rules writers were issued a brief to make the line overpowered to sell models then they did a fantastically poor job. The two big releases of 9th (Primaris and Necrons) all had fairly ho-hum rules.

I think that there is, no doubt, corporate pressure to keep to the Codex release schedule. Time is a finite resource, and even the smartest people will make mistakes under time constraints. Perhaps various Codex teams simply ran out of time to get real play-testing before they had to ship the book? Do we really think that Notthingham was sitting on a surplus of Voidreavers and that the writers were told "Make this book sell Voidreavers with bonkers rules or its back to the street with the lot of you!"

Doesn't excuse the Harlequins, but I wonder if the Nottingham folks play a different 40K game in their closed garden?

Anyhoo. Looking forward to what the Easter Buggie will bring us.

 Eldarsif wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

Toofast wrote:
. . .
After reading this, it's not surprising at all that GW games are horrible for balance. You have accountants who have never played a game of Warhammer telling the rules writers how to write the rules.

I want to be fair to accountants here and say that it's very likely actual accountants had nothing to do with those decisions. But yes, not designer/s either. Some dumb manager who either doesn't play the game or only does so in a very superficial way.

I would also add that it has been 7 years since AoS was released and at the time Kirby was leading the company. Now, that's not to say that everything is peachy at GW HQ, but 7 years is a long time in the industry so we have no idea how things are done right now.

GW is a very opaque company and often hard to get recent information from it. I think the last twitter thread was from one of the AT designers that I remember.

I'll give you that, but judging by the state of the 4 newest codexes on release, it seems like they're still using that methodology for rules. 9 voidweavers is broken because literally nobody at GW ever thought to playtest that list. They probably took 1 in a small Harlequin detachment as part of an eldar army using a mix of all their units, only playtested it against custodes, tau, and tyranids, and said "yup, good to go, ship it!" If a rules writer or playtester raised their hand and said "wait a minute, why don't we try this skew list because it seems like that unit would be really powerful", they were quickly shot down by higher ups, told to quit wasting time and get back to playtesting with just what's in the eldritch omens box.

I think that new models tend to sell themselves pretty well given the amount of positive comments they get on social media and the like. I think the meta chasing tournament scene tends to overvalue itself when it comes to how much they are putting into the company.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Is "rushed, overworked, and underpaid" a viable explanation? Or are we stuck arguing over malice or stupidity?

Stuck with malice and stupidity according to the internet even though it would be pretty hard to both be too stupid to balance the Voidweaver and ALSO make it busted maliciously.

I don't think that tneva82 (making the stupidity argument) and ccs (making the malice argument) constitute "the internet".

The Eldar codex is a BIG book. I think it's entirely possible that changes to the Voidweaver were made after playtesting, and then never playtested, due to time constraints, similar to the change to the Dark Lance damage profile. Or that it was never sufficiently playtested at all. But that doesn't let gw off of the hook. It just means that the corporate leadership of the company needs to invest more into their rules writing and playtesting staff.

I'm in several FB groups and reddit frequently. The amount of people claiming the new ( and terrible ) Tzaangor AOR was a ploy to sell Tzaangors was off the hook.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ordana wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
Is "rushed, overworked, and underpaid" a viable explanation? Or are we stuck arguing over malice or stupidity?

Its certainly a factor in the grand scheme of things, But I wonder how rushed overworked and underpayed you have to be to miss the Voidweaver being stupid for 90 points.

I mentioned it earlier, but no one seemed to take it up. How stupid was the Raider at 85? Does a VW, which has fewer wounds at 5 points more seem absurd at that point? People used to have 6 or 7 Raiders running around.

TangoTwoBravo wrote:
I think the modern trend has been that new models have underwhelming rules. People had aneurisms over Eradicators

My aneurysm came from the fact they removed the double shooting from Aggressors but Eradicators kept it for........reasons.

 TwinPoleTheory wrote:
there's no incentive to spend a lot of time and money on a testing phase that could impact a release schedule.

That's it right there. They need releases and they need them on a schedule. It needs to go to print to slot it in time regardless of where they are in any sort of testing process. The bean counters aren't going to hold up the show to make sure things are right. Look at Cyberpunk 2077 or any other half-released video game in recent years.