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 ClockworkZion wrote:
Honestly I was asking because I know sometimes nerfs feel worse on paper than when you actually put the army on the table and I was wondering if anyone upset about the nerfs had gotten a game in to see if they're as bad as the hot takes think they might be.

I really don't need to play a game against the Guard to know that I think them auto-wounding because....Guard. is just a dumb rule.
Dumb mechanically & dumb lore wise.

ccs wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Honestly I was asking because I know sometimes nerfs feel worse on paper than when you actually put the army on the table and I was wondering if anyone upset about the nerfs had gotten a game in to see if they're as bad as the hot takes think they might be.

I really don't need to play a game against the Guard to know that I think them auto-wounding because....Guard. is just a dumb rule.
Dumb mechanically & dumb lore wise.

I said "nerfs" as in the Custodes nerf, but nice to make this about Guard who didn't get nerfed.

JakeSiren wrote:

 Ordana wrote:

stratigo wrote:
The entirety of art of war. Goonhammer. Mani Cheema. Name a player who regularly places at the top of majors, and if they have said anything about custodes, it's that they were nerfed out of competitive play entirely.

Also, marines (all of them) are better now too. So are admech. So are sisters. Et cetera. Custodes didn't just get nerfed, like half the factions (Or at least it sometimes feels like power armor is half the factions) in the game caught a serious and dramatic buff.

If the current competitive meta any 'balanced' codex is out of competitively play because the top is firmly ruled by utterly broken codexes running near or above 70% winrates.

Being good for competitive and being balanced are 2 very different things right now and that is a bad thing. We want those 2 concepts to get closer together. And yes that means any other codex that ends up doing as well as Custodes were doing should get slapped down hard.

I want to live in a world where all codexes have a 45-55% winrate against basically the entire field and not what we have now where its 65+% armies that decide everything, where you can have GT's with the top 10 consisting of 3 codexes. I want the player to decide the outcome, not the army.

There's actually considerably more nuance than just a 45-55% win rate. For example, I played at a large event with my Drukhari. One of the matches I was against a Tau player. The game was won on who got first turn - both of our armies did considerable damage and were not sufficiently resilient. We could have played 100 games and got 50 wins and 50 losses each, but the game came down to the singular dice roll to see who got first turn or not.

Part of the discussion should be what the overall game experience is like. It's no good if "balance" is decided by winning or losing one roll off. I don't think anyone here is interested in playing a glorified coin flip simulator. One of the better metrics I have seen around balance is win/loss rate grouped by first/second turn. An army should have a 45-55% win rate if they go first, and a 45-55% win rate if they go second. To me, this shows that an actual game has been played, rather than the players going through the motions of resolving the foregone conclusion.

first turn can be so important because lethality is way way to high in 9th. Ofcourse 'balance' is a lot more nuanced then simply win/loss % in a vaccume but this is an internet shouting match, talk about nuances just gets lost in the noise.

Depends really. If two players have built armies which are "go first or be screwed" - then... well, I don't know how the game can fix that. Barring very hard limitations on people building lists like that.

Certain factions should I think be more glass cannons than others. If two of them meet, the game should be quick and deadly. By contrast if two adamantium anvils (?) meet, the game should be protracted, and probably large amounts of both armies should still be there at the end of turn 5. As said, the issue with 9th was that every army was a glass cannon. I think GW are trying to fix that in the new books and AoC, but... yeah. We'll see.

I believe GW wants pretty much everything to be dead at the end of turn 5. That's why there are agendas that are basically "kill everything".

They probably don't want everything dead in the first/second turn, hence AoC and the nerfs to indirect fire/aircraft, but IMHO they want tabling to be common.

 Tyran wrote:
I believe GW wants pretty much everything to be dead at the end of turn 5. That's why there are agendas that are basically "kill everything".

They probably don't want everything dead in the first/second turn, hence AoC and the nerfs to indirect fire/aircraft, but IMHO they want tabling to be common.

Well they want a game to last 2-3 hours, and want to sell you lots. So the only solution they can see if to have everything die quick enough to achieve that.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
I believe GW wants pretty much everything to be dead at the end of turn 5. That's why there are agendas that are basically "kill everything".

They probably don't want everything dead in the first/second turn, hence AoC and the nerfs to indirect fire/aircraft, but IMHO they want tabling to be common.

Well they want a game to last 2-3 hours, and want to sell you lots. So the only solution they can see if to have everything die quick enough to achieve that.

They want the game to be good for tournaments which means it shouldn't run over the 3hr time. Making things more lethal across the board was a way to accomplish shorter games. Same with small tables, gets to the action faster and gets the game over faster.

They want MATCHED PLAY with GT Mission Packs to be good for tournaments.

They want MATCHED PLAY with the Tempest of War deck to be good for competitive stand-alone pick-up games.

They want CRUSADE to be good for campaign and narrative players.

They want OPEN play to be good for beginners and ultra casuals.

They also want competitive players to engage in both Incursion level and Strike Force level games. They want Crusade and Open players to engage in games of all 4 sizes.

Any statement less complex than this about what GW wants is a half truth at best. It took a lot of time and investment to create the tools necessary to do all of these things, and they wouldn't have done any of it unless they expected a part of the player base to engage with each of those options.

PenitentJake wrote:
They want MATCHED PLAY with GT Mission Packs to be good for tournaments.

They want MATCHED PLAY with the Tempest of War deck to be good for competitive stand-alone pick-up games.

They want CRUSADE to be good for campaign and narrative players.

They want OPEN play to be good for beginners and ultra casuals.

They also want competitive players to engage in both Incursion level and Strike Force level games. They want Crusade and Open players to engage in games of all 4 sizes.

Any statement less complex than this about what GW wants is a half truth at best. It took a lot of time and investment to create the tools necessary to do all of these things, and they wouldn't have done any of it unless they expected a part of the player base to engage with each of those options.

What they want is for a broad enough audience to be placated with their band aid fixes so that they don't lose money.

PenitentJake wrote:
They want MATCHED PLAY with GT Mission Packs to be good for tournaments.

They want MATCHED PLAY with the Tempest of War deck to be good for competitive stand-alone pick-up games.

They want CRUSADE to be good for campaign and narrative players.

They want OPEN play to be good for beginners and ultra casuals.

They want MATCHED PLAY because they're heavily courting the tournament crowd as they tend to spend the most and do so quickly.

They want CRUSADE play because it allows them to put out multiple expensive campaign books that they invalidate within 5 months of release.

They want OPEN play because "2 ways to play" sounds stupid in marketing speak, so they had to invent a third.

You may not have noticed the part of the PDF that mentioned that they didn't include any Crusade Content in the document, and that all of it is still valid (according to the rules in the book- ie. you have to fight a battle as part of the campaign to get the "badge" that lets you keep the Crusade upgrades even if your army leaves the campaign setting).

Not being able to use the AoR's or the meager supplements included in cmpaign books isn't that big a deal to me... But even if it was, that's the magical thing about every part of the game that ISN'T Matched play: none of the restrictions that drive people bat$#!+ crazy really apply. If you want to use the AoR's or Supplements in your Crusade games? Talk it out with your opponent and/ or your GM and you're probably good to go.

PenitentJake wrote:
You may not have noticed the part of the PDF that mentioned that they didn't include any Crusade Content in the document, and that all of it is still valid (according to the rules in the book- ie. you have to fight a battle as part of the campaign to get the "badge" that lets you keep the Crusade upgrades even if your army leaves the campaign setting).

And the books are all going OOP.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

ccs wrote:

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Honestly I was asking because I know sometimes nerfs feel worse on paper than when you actually put the army on the table and I was wondering if anyone upset about the nerfs had gotten a game in to see if they're as bad as the hot takes think they might be.

I really don't need to play a game against the Guard to know that I think them auto-wounding because....Guard. is just a dumb rule.
Dumb mechanically & dumb lore wise.

I said "nerfs" as in the Custodes nerf, but nice to make this about Guard who didn't get nerfed.

My points the same. I have decades if experience playing these & other games. Buff/nerf/change.... I don't need to actually play a game to A) understand it's effect in a game, B) know my opinion of said buff/nerf/change.

Sure.

But if you bothered to buy one, its Crusade content is still valid.

If you didn't buy one, then I would assume it doesn't matter to you whether or not the content is invalidated, because it was obviously content you didn't care about in the first place.

To many people, out of print is the same as dead is the same as not valid any longer.

 auticus wrote:
To many people, out of print is the same as dead is the same as not valid any longer.

Many people are, therefore, idiots.

 Dysartes wrote:

 auticus wrote:
To many people, out of print is the same as dead is the same as not valid any longer.

Many people are, therefore, idiots.

Doesn't change the fact that you will get resistance for using them from people, justified or not.

JakeSiren wrote:

 Ordana wrote:

stratigo wrote:
The entirety of art of war. Goonhammer. Mani Cheema. Name a player who regularly places at the top of majors, and if they have said anything about custodes, it's that they were nerfed out of competitive play entirely.

Also, marines (all of them) are better now too. So are admech. So are sisters. Et cetera. Custodes didn't just get nerfed, like half the factions (Or at least it sometimes feels like power armor is half the factions) in the game caught a serious and dramatic buff.

If the current competitive meta any 'balanced' codex is out of competitively play because the top is firmly ruled by utterly broken codexes running near or above 70% winrates.

Being good for competitive and being balanced are 2 very different things right now and that is a bad thing. We want those 2 concepts to get closer together. And yes that means any other codex that ends up doing as well as Custodes were doing should get slapped down hard.

I want to live in a world where all codexes have a 45-55% winrate against basically the entire field and not what we have now where its 65+% armies that decide everything, where you can have GT's with the top 10 consisting of 3 codexes. I want the player to decide the outcome, not the army.

There's actually considerably more nuance than just a 45-55% win rate. For example, I played at a large event with my Drukhari. One of the matches I was against a Tau player. The game was won on who got first turn - both of our armies did considerable damage and were not sufficiently resilient. We could have played 100 games and got 50 wins and 50 losses each, but the game came down to the singular dice roll to see who got first turn or not.

Part of the discussion should be what the overall game experience is like. It's no good if "balance" is decided by winning or losing one roll off. I don't think anyone here is interested in playing a glorified coin flip simulator. One of the better metrics I have seen around balance is win/loss rate grouped by first/second turn. An army should have a 45-55% win rate if they go first, and a 45-55% win rate if they go second. To me, this shows that an actual game has been played, rather than the players going through the motions of resolving the foregone conclusion.

that's actually pretty rare, the first turn bias is at the lowest I think it might have ever been now, especially with indirect nerfs.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Toofast wrote:

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
I believe GW wants pretty much everything to be dead at the end of turn 5. That's why there are agendas that are basically "kill everything".

They probably don't want everything dead in the first/second turn, hence AoC and the nerfs to indirect fire/aircraft, but IMHO they want tabling to be common.

Well they want a game to last 2-3 hours, and want to sell you lots. So the only solution they can see if to have everything die quick enough to achieve that.

They want the game to be good for tournaments which means it shouldn't run over the 3hr time. Making things more lethal across the board was a way to accomplish shorter games. Same with small tables, gets to the action faster and gets the game over faster.

shorter games are generally better because people don't have infinite time

PenitentJake wrote:
If you didn't buy one, then I would assume it doesn't matter to you whether or not the content is invalidated, because it was obviously content you didn't care about in the first place.

I didn't buy that because GW's printed 40k material shelf life is so short (and getting shorter) that buying these really expensive books is a fool's errand.

 auticus wrote:
To many people, out of print is the same as dead is the same as not valid any longer.

"Sorry, that cool scenario from PA is no longer printed, I refuse to have that story told to me." - no crusade player ever

 Jidmah wrote:

 auticus wrote:
To many people, out of print is the same as dead is the same as not valid any longer.

"Sorry, that cool scenario from PA is no longer printed, I refuse to have that story told to me." - no crusade player ever

Yeah, it's not a real concern for narrative players. Our Crusade group happily bashes whatever PA, WD, CA, rulebook or some random older book missions to 9th compatible form and haves fun with them. Just yesterday I played a mission from 2018's White Dwarf for funsies. The game before that was from old Cityfight.

Short shelf life is moot on missions, as long as any participating player can just say "I've got this cool baseline here, want to work out how it would play out now?" with whatever publication they have at hand and game happens. For matched purposes this is of course a different story, with supplements coming and going, and I agree on buying 40k expansions solely for that purpose being a fool's errand.

JakeSiren wrote:
There's actually considerably more nuance than just a 45-55% win rate. For example, I played at a large event with my Drukhari. One of the matches I was against a Tau player. The game was won on who got first turn - both of our armies did considerable damage and were not sufficiently resilient. We could have played 100 games and got 50 wins and 50 losses each, but the game came down to the singular dice roll to see who got first turn or not.

Part of the discussion should be what the overall game experience is like. It's no good if "balance" is decided by winning or losing one roll off. I don't think anyone here is interested in playing a glorified coin flip simulator. One of the better metrics I have seen around balance is win/loss rate grouped by first/second turn. An army should have a 45-55% win rate if they go first, and a 45-55% win rate if they go second. To me, this shows that an actual game has been played, rather than the players going through the motions of resolving the foregone conclusion.

Well that's what tournament play is and what tournament try hard's wants. And GW has provided. Result is I now fail <0.5% predictions who wins based on hundreds of BR's on youtube and own games.

 Jidmah wrote:

 auticus wrote:
To many people, out of print is the same as dead is the same as not valid any longer.

"Sorry, that cool scenario from PA is no longer printed, I refuse to have that story told to me." - no crusade player ever

Great, now just crusade has to become the dominant way to play for people and we will all be set for the good times.

Crusade already is by far the second most popular way to play, right after tournament-style matched play. For every two people playing matched play, one person is playing crusade.

Oh, and auticus responding a post specifically talking about crusade resources.

And frankly, if you are playing GT 40k only, you are a fool if you are taking the bait and paying GW for those campaign books solely for that 5% extra chance to win.

tneva82 wrote:

JakeSiren wrote:
There's actually considerably more nuance than just a 45-55% win rate. For example, I played at a large event with my Drukhari. One of the matches I was against a Tau player. The game was won on who got first turn - both of our armies did considerable damage and were not sufficiently resilient. We could have played 100 games and got 50 wins and 50 losses each, but the game came down to the singular dice roll to see who got first turn or not.

Part of the discussion should be what the overall game experience is like. It's no good if "balance" is decided by winning or losing one roll off. I don't think anyone here is interested in playing a glorified coin flip simulator. One of the better metrics I have seen around balance is win/loss rate grouped by first/second turn. An army should have a 45-55% win rate if they go first, and a 45-55% win rate if they go second. To me, this shows that an actual game has been played, rather than the players going through the motions of resolving the foregone conclusion.

Well that's what tournament play is and what tournament try hard's wants. And GW has provided. Result is I now fail <0.5% predictions who wins based on hundreds of BR's on youtube and own games.

And why do you think 'whoever gets first turn wins' is something tournament 'try hards' want? Surely people who want to win tournaments don't want to have to win the start coinflip 5-6 times in a row in order to claim the crown. Seems very unreliable as a means to victory but a great way to go 3-2 and then cry about how weak your faction is.

I think you fellas have raised an intriguing point. What is the validity of GW purposely making the game exceptionally deadly, because it's essentially become an extremely slow game of baseball. Like Yankees vs Redsox. (Both US baseball teams known for dragging out the clock in underhanded ways).


GW has to know that the most boring part about their tournaments are the 3-5 hours they have to focus on adults moving plastic toys around, and measuring, then re-measuring, and triple checking, then looking up rules, and finally removing models from a board. They can't run commercials or do ad buys during these. Because they're live most of the time. The best they can do is a banner or a clickable ad schema.

GW might honestly be trying to drop their games to under 2 hours. I could honestly see a savy PR rep saying "This game is selling well, but it's boring as hell to watch. It's Golf but without the crowds. Can we speed it up by 50%? Make the games basically a sudden death? Where 1 wrong move causes a handshake?"

I can seriously get behind the theory that GW is intentionally speeding up the game through sheer killiness. Invulns? What invulns? Auto-MWs on 6's. This Psyker can do 20MWs per turn! This Cannon can bracket a titan in one turn! This HQ model can wipe a Custodes Guardian Shield squad off the map in a single turn!

I don't know. I consider pretty much every game and sports in the world, barring a very few exceptions (all sports), as boring as hell to watch. Even if they are a lot of fun to play in person.

Seriously, do you enjoy watching people playing boardgames, cardgames or videogames? Is there even a market for that?

 Blackie wrote:
I don't know. I consider pretty much every game and sports in the world, barring a very few exceptions (all sports), as boring as hell to watch. Even if they are a lot of fun to play in person.

Seriously, do you enjoy watching people playing boardgames, cardgames or videogames? Is there even a market for that?

Is this a bad time to introduce someone to Twitch? I don't want that on my conscience.

 Blackie wrote:
I don't know. I consider pretty much every game and sports in the world, barring a very few exceptions (all sports), as boring as hell to watch. Even if they are a lot of fun to play in person.

Seriously, do you enjoy watching people playing boardgames, cardgames or videogames? Is there even a market for that?

Putting aside the fact Twitch's existence shows there's a substantial market for watching video games, I can say I do enjoy watching people play board games, card games and other wargames. Not all games, and not all people, but enough to suggest it's not impossible to make these things entertaining under the right circumstances.

We can argue about what those circumstances would be, but one thing I know for sure, is that 40k is the opposite of an enjoyable spectacle to watch online. The "action" is ponderous, there are far too many dice rolled and it's really hard to get good video of what's happening, especially live. If GW's goal was to make 40k more appealing to an online audience they'd need to do more than just cut the game length in half.

I had no idea about the existence of Twitch, and that there was a market for that stuff, honest.

Thing about watching 40k is that the game itself isn't really enjoyable to watch, it's the context that might be fun. I mean watching edited 90min bat reps between people who have entertainment skills might be fun. Watching competitive 40k live games that last 3 hours and in which players act like robots it's certainly not fun to watch for many. Even if they last much less probably.

Several youtube channels get a lot of views by posting bat reps but those videos are either edited and reduced in length or either picture someone that is able to turn the game into a show. Typically both. Competitive players don't care about being part of a show, they barely talk.