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 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 VladimirHerzog wrote:


seems like i misremembered that, sorry.

But weren't the harlequins thought as "fair" on release?

How about you tell us? It's your argument, you should be supplying us with the evidence to back it up.

so i found this article which seems to put them at 7-9/10, and nothing in there seemed to call for heavy nerfs

we even get this from Nick

I think they would be a 7 out of 10. Maybe an 8 if someone really mastered them. Capable of winning a Major, but it would be hard, and a super major is probably out of reach.

even in the goonhammer codex review, they weren't considering bringing 9x voidweavers in every lists and seemed to favor bikes over them

It did take about a week looking at the book for people to figure out how bonkers Harlequins were.

IMO it took second for people to notice how much voids can do and what points costs they have. I would say 1-2 min max, depending if someone worked of leaks or an actual pdf of the book.

Karol wrote:
IMO it took second for people to notice how much voids can do and what points costs they have. I would say 1-2 min max, depending if someone worked of leaks or an actual pdf of the book.

And yet, it was still at least a week for people to figure out Harlequins as a whole were busted.

ERJAK wrote:

Karol wrote:
IMO it took second for people to notice how much voids can do and what points costs they have. I would say 1-2 min max, depending if someone worked of leaks or an actual pdf of the book.

And yet, it was still at least a week for people to figure out Harlequins as a whole were busted.

Is that really your argument when the "rules writers" have how much time to write these rules?

EviscerationPlague wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

Karol wrote:
IMO it took second for people to notice how much voids can do and what points costs they have. I would say 1-2 min max, depending if someone worked of leaks or an actual pdf of the book.

And yet, it was still at least a week for people to figure out Harlequins as a whole were busted.

Is that really your argument when the "rules writers" have how much time to write these rules?

Who is making excuses for GW or their designers? They have low talent and they are mismanaged. I'm just being realistic about what level of effort and management would be required to produce good content. GW can get playtesting done for free but they are completely wasting the playtesters' time because of their production schedule and a seeming lack of making basic preparations for playtesting by considering available combos and doing a couple of spreadsheets to ensure that units need to be adjusted 10% during final playtesting instead of 30% 4 weeks after release.

EviscerationPlague wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

Karol wrote:
IMO it took second for people to notice how much voids can do and what points costs they have. I would say 1-2 min max, depending if someone worked of leaks or an actual pdf of the book.

And yet, it was still at least a week for people to figure out Harlequins as a whole were busted.

Is that really your argument when the "rules writers" have how much time to write these rules?

We dont know how much time they have to write them, we don't know how many playtesters get the rules, we don't know what rules the playtesters get, we don't know what the lead time is, we don't know anything really. So you're angrily defending a position with 0 knowledge of their operating process. Nobody is saying they do a good job, but you can't in honestly say the writers do a bad job either, or the play testers, as there is no context.

Dudeface wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

Karol wrote:
IMO it took second for people to notice how much voids can do and what points costs they have. I would say 1-2 min max, depending if someone worked of leaks or an actual pdf of the book.

And yet, it was still at least a week for people to figure out Harlequins as a whole were busted.

Is that really your argument when the "rules writers" have how much time to write these rules?

We dont know how much time they have to write them, we don't know how many playtesters get the rules, we don't know what rules the playtesters get, we don't know what the lead time is, we don't know anything really. So you're angrily defending a position with 0 knowledge of their operating process. Nobody is saying they do a good job, but you can't in honestly say the writers do a bad job either, or the play testers, as there is no context.

If you have 3 hours to update a codex you still have no reason to put in a bunch of stupid gak like the Custodes Chapter Tactics and Combat Doctrines, it was a completely functional faction and the designer(s) made it way more complicated and completely OP.

 Dysartes wrote:
I'm going to have to [Citation required] that claim - might just be that I've missed it, but even with the low regard I hold the groups that are doing the playtesting, I've not heard anything about this sort of malicious action.

What kind of citation are you expecting? A shaky cellphone video secretly taken of them talking at a tournament? A link to a paywalled podcast taken down regularly a few months after its release? Someone time traveling back in time to retrospectively record what was slipped in a twitch livestream?
It's not like there any public blog articles about how they are manipulating GW while twirling their moustaches, they aren't dumb enough to jeopardize their livelihood by putting that in writing.

There are more of a few coincidences of professional players saying as much, and seeing how their actual blog posts from months earlier align with what ends in GW's rules updates there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to make it way more than just a conspiracy theory.
And just for the record, I wasn't even aware of that LVO reddit thing, but it seems to fit the bill.

It's also important to not blame playtest groups in general, but certain professional players whose opinions seem to weigh more than other's. But a few rotten apples are enough to spoil the bunch.

 vict0988 wrote:

Dudeface wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

Karol wrote:
IMO it took second for people to notice how much voids can do and what points costs they have. I would say 1-2 min max, depending if someone worked of leaks or an actual pdf of the book.

And yet, it was still at least a week for people to figure out Harlequins as a whole were busted.

Is that really your argument when the "rules writers" have how much time to write these rules?

We dont know how much time they have to write them, we don't know how many playtesters get the rules, we don't know what rules the playtesters get, we don't know what the lead time is, we don't know anything really. So you're angrily defending a position with 0 knowledge of their operating process. Nobody is saying they do a good job, but you can't in honestly say the writers do a bad job either, or the play testers, as there is no context.

If you have 3 hours to update a codex you still have no reason to put in a bunch of stupid gak like the Custodes Chapter Tactics and Combat Doctrines, it was a completely functional faction and the designer(s) made it way more complicated and completely OP.

Interesting take, you have 30 minutes to propose an alternative to doctrines and by extension super doctrines for space marines and all relevant chapters. It must leave them perfectly functional I.e. able to compete but not OP. Go.

FWIW. I think everyone thought the reanimator sucked at 110 points.

I think the issue with Harlequins is that they were in the Eldar Codex. If this had been a separate release, I think everyone would have concluded it was broken immediately. Instead however (if you are anything like me) you only reached those datasheets after an hour or something of Eldar, and so didn't really give it suitable attention. (I spent far more time for instance trying to work out why Ynnari rules seemed designed not to work like the fluff than looking at the Voidweaver). Which isn't a good excuse for rules writers - but may explain some commentary at the time.

I think my issue is that basic mathhammer analysis is not difficult. Someone at GW - given say a day (an hour or two probably but lets be generous) - should be able to set up in a spreadsheet to math out every codex. This would pick out obvious "mathhammer" imbalances. If a unit is incredibly lethal/pillowfisted, tough/fragile for the points, it should be obvious incredibly quickly. There is more to 40k than this (mostly movement abilities, Obsec etc - things relating to scoring whose impact is harder to model in a speadsheet) - but basic comparisons are still not that difficult. If my 100 points is faster, does more damage and takes less damage than your 100 points its going to be a problem.

 Jidmah wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:
I'm going to have to [Citation required] that claim - might just be that I've missed it, but even with the low regard I hold the groups that are doing the playtesting, I've not heard anything about this sort of malicious action.

What kind of citation are you expecting? A shaky cellphone video secretly taken of them talking at a tournament? A link to a paywalled podcast taken down regularly a few months after its release? Someone time traveling back in time to retrospectively record what was slipped in a twitch livestream?
It's not like there any public blog articles about how they are manipulating GW while twirling their moustaches, they aren't dumb enough to jeopardize their livelihood by putting that in writing.

There are more of a few coincidences of professional players saying as much, and seeing how their actual blog posts from months earlier align with what ends in GW's rules updates there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to make it way more than just a conspiracy theory.

So, post that evidence then, even if it is circumstantial? Which professional players? What did they say? What blog posts? What evidence is there that elevates that pretty big claim above a baseless conspiracy theory?

I really don't understand this response.

 catbarf wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:
I'm going to have to [Citation required] that claim - might just be that I've missed it, but even with the low regard I hold the groups that are doing the playtesting, I've not heard anything about this sort of malicious action.

What kind of citation are you expecting? A shaky cellphone video secretly taken of them talking at a tournament? A link to a paywalled podcast taken down regularly a few months after its release? Someone time traveling back in time to retrospectively record what was slipped in a twitch livestream?
It's not like there any public blog articles about how they are manipulating GW while twirling their moustaches, they aren't dumb enough to jeopardize their livelihood by putting that in writing.

There are more of a few coincidences of professional players saying as much, and seeing how their actual blog posts from months earlier align with what ends in GW's rules updates there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to make it way more than just a conspiracy theory.

So, post that evidence then, even if it is circumstantial? Which professional players? What did they say? What blog posts? What evidence is there that elevates that pretty big claim above a baseless conspiracy theory?

I really don't understand this response.

I can help with a translation of the response: "I have no evidence and am just throwing out baseless claims".

It's an especially odd claim, as we already know from playtesters that they have absolutely no idea whether GW will take their feedback on board. Even if feedback is acted upon, there's no guarantee it'll be in the way the playtesters recommend. Tabletop Tactics have previously mentioned the Dark Lance as an example, where they playtested it at Damage D6 and were surprised to see it appear in the Codex at D3+3, since they were never given that version to test.

I don't know about hard evidence of "haha, I'm rigging this cos I love faction X and hate faction Y" - but I think there is definitely some sense of "for this faction to be playable, it must be capable of reliably winning a major. To reliably win a major it must have a huge advantage versus 90% of the field. And therefore...."

Whereas to my mind a faction where a good player might expect to go 3-2 is in a perfectly reasonable spot. Survivor bias can kick in here - but if everyone got such a result that would be sort of what you'd expect to see in a balanced game. Are for instance post-nerf Custodes now "unplayable?" Well the win% would suggest no. But equally, I don't expect to see them winning majors.

As said, I think we do have evidence where people reporting back to GW think something is too good or too bad - and yet their reasoning would seem to be wrong. Hence we get the results we do.

I mean I can't believe every playtester said "these Tyranids are crazy, literally everything but the gaunts could go up 10%" and GW went "nah, what do they know". Mainly because apparently someone did say 6 point Termagants would be broken hence pushing them up to 7.

Tyel wrote:
I don't know about hard evidence of "haha, I'm rigging this cos I love faction X and hate faction Y" - but I think there is definitely some sense of "for this faction to be playable, it must be capable of reliably winning a major. To reliably win a major it must have a huge advantage versus 90% of the field. And therefore...."

Whereas to my mind a faction where a good player might expect to go 3-2 is in a perfectly reasonable spot. Survivor bias can kick in here - but if everyone got such a result that would be sort of what you'd expect to see in a balanced game. Are for instance post-nerf Custodes now "unplayable?" Well the win% would suggest no. But equally, I don't expect to see them winning majors.

As said, I think we do have evidence where people reporting back to GW think something is too good or too bad - and yet their reasoning would seem to be wrong. Hence we get the results we do.

I mean I can't believe every playtester said "these Tyranids are crazy, literally everything but the gaunts could go up 10%" and GW went "nah, what do they know". Mainly because apparently someone did say 6 point Termagants would be broken hence pushing them up to 7.

your assuming an awful lot here with absolutely nothing to show for it.

We have no evidence to show that GW listens to playtesters. Infact its more like the opposite, we know they push things that were never tested to begin with.

Do you have something that paints to Termagants being increased in cost as a result of playtester feedback?
And that playtesters pushed Nids, Tau, Custodes, Eldar, Quins, Dark Eldar and Orks into broken OP? That the last 5 out of 6 books released were OP because of testers? And no one playing GSC so they get fethed, but somehow end up with perhaps the 'best' internally balanced codex that mostly just suffers from everyone else being in a different league?

It certainly reads like you have nothing and are just trying to divert blame, that these unknown playtesters are the real reason for GW constantly pushing out more and more broken crap.
Because no one has ever heard of stubborn developers that refuse to listen to feedback because they think they know best, or don't have time to test at all because there is another codex due next tuesday already and they still need to come up with 2 'chapter tactics' traits.

n/m.

I typed up a long post about this topic, but in the end I'll just be getting more rude responses of who can't even parse posts longer than six words properly, are quick to throw about insults just to write the exact same thing as I did afterwards.

Feel free to use google and the dakka search function to find out yourself if you care. I see no reason to help this poor excuse for a community anymore.

edit: One last thing though, though it should be absolutely clear to anyone with more than two braincells - I absolutely was not referring to tabletop titans. I'm like 99% sure they do the best job playtesting they can.

 Jidmah wrote:
n/m.

I typed up a long post about this topic, but in the end I'll just be getting more rude responses of who can't even parse posts longer than six words properly, are quick to throw about insults just to write the exact same thing as I did afterwards.

Feel free to use google and the dakka search function to find out yourself if you care. I see no reason to help this poor excuse for a community anymore.

Putting people on ignore makes it feel like they never existed at all.
Super satisfying.

 Ordana wrote:
your assuming an awful lot here with absolutely nothing to show for it.

We have no evidence to show that GW listens to playtesters. Infact its more like the opposite, we know they push things that were never tested to begin with.

Do you have something that paints to Termagants being increased in cost as a result of playtester feedback?

You sort of come at this obliquely.

I'm not blaming anyone but GW. Its their game. They make the final decisions. The end.

But that doesn't mean you can't comment on the playtestering - which is happening, and is seemingly resulting in these books. Yes you can conclude that GW just writes something, and then ignores all feedback - or releases something completely different. But I'm not sure the evidence for that is there.

So we have the TTT guys saying they tested D6 damage lances rather than D3+3. Okay, sure. Makes sense.
But did they test 10 point wyches? Cheap bloodbrides? 16 point Incubi? DT liquifier Wracks & Cronos? Were Raiders somehow "fine" at 85 points with D6 damage Lances, even though they still facilitated all of the above? Drazhar & Succubi? Because I'd argue these elements were a much greater impact than the 5-6 D3+3 damage lances you saw in a typical early DE era list.

I mean I can do the whole "people get it wrong thing". I remember the doom and gloom in DE circles (which I shared) when the codex was being previewed - because there seemed a real lack of power compared to say Marines. And then you played it and went "oh look, hang on, with all these upgrades and stacked rules everything I touch just dies - and I can reliably touch things 20" away."

Now I'm sure the TTT guys just want what's best for the game. I mean name dropping sounds weird - but I even met them once at an event. And as a DE player I can tell you "assault DE" has kind of been an awful experience for the best part of 10 years. (I mean it kept going into 6th with the 5th codex - but the legs increasingly gave out on it.) So its not surprising you might think - in a world of pure theory - that all these buffs would be fine. But as said, a few games of "I move my transports up and maybe corner to shoot a thing. Okay now I disembark and... delete half your army" should have provoked a question mark.

I'm afraid for Termagants going to 7 points I have "people chatting on the internet". So yeah, they may have just been making it up.

Dudeface wrote:
...you have 30 minutes to propose an alternative to doctrines and by extension super doctrines for space marines and all relevant chapters. It must leave them perfectly functional I.e. able to compete but not OP. Go.

Relics that have rules that are tied into the faction/chapter identity instead of being a +1 chainsword. Points have to be rebalanced when Chapter Tactics, Armour of Contempt and Angels of Death is removed anyway so it's not a lot of extra work for playtesters.

 vict0988 wrote:

Dudeface wrote:
...you have 30 minutes to propose an alternative to doctrines and by extension super doctrines for space marines and all relevant chapters. It must leave them perfectly functional I.e. able to compete but not OP. Go.

Relics that have rules that are tied into the faction/chapter identity instead of being a +1 chainsword. Points have to be rebalanced when Chapter Tactics, Armour of Contempt and Angels of Death is removed anyway so it's not a lot of extra work for playtesters.

No, you said with 30 minutes you could manage better than combat doctrines, all you did here was shrug and delegate.

Tyel wrote:

I think my issue is that basic mathhammer analysis is not difficult. Someone at GW - given say a day (an hour or two probably but lets be generous) - should be able to set up in a spreadsheet to math out every codex. This would pick out obvious "mathhammer" imbalances. If a unit is incredibly lethal/pillowfisted, tough/fragile for the points, it should be obvious incredibly quickly. There is more to 40k than this (mostly movement abilities, Obsec etc - things relating to scoring whose impact is harder to model in a speadsheet) - but basic comparisons are still not that difficult. If my 100 points is faster, does more damage and takes less damage than your 100 points its going to be a problem.

It's a LOT harder than you think. You can do the basic math on a unit pretty quickly (and I agree that GW doesn't do this). But between the many factions, many options, and strats, even seemingly innocuous buffs quickly go off the rails once things start stacking. Many units are not OP out of the gate, but give them a combo of strats and they go nuts, which is REALLY hard to model in the context of the larger whole.

Now, that doesn't excuse a bunch of stuff, like voidweavers, pyrovores, etc, which are broken just with baseline capability. But as a baseline, AdMech rangers are (or used to be) pretty good out of the gate, but nowhere near broken for a 5-man unit. Once you buff that to 20, then re-rolls, then strats, and you get a unit that isn't broken for it's points, but could remove almost any unit in the game. So it wasn't any 1 ability, it was a combination of abilities at the extremes (we software developers call this 'testing the edge cases').

Dudeface wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

Dudeface wrote:
...you have 30 minutes to propose an alternative to doctrines and by extension super doctrines for space marines and all relevant chapters. It must leave them perfectly functional I.e. able to compete but not OP. Go.

Relics that have rules that are tied into the faction/chapter identity instead of being a +1 chainsword. Points have to be rebalanced when Chapter Tactics, Armour of Contempt and Angels of Death is removed anyway so it's not a lot of extra work for playtesters.

No, you said with 30 minutes you could manage better than combat doctrines, all you did here was shrug and delegate.

Yeah, it was actually easy to fix and many people did. Forced moving so nobody is perpetually in the Heavy doctrine for more than two turns. Bam, done.

Dudeface wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

Dudeface wrote:
...you have 30 minutes to propose an alternative to doctrines and by extension super doctrines for space marines and all relevant chapters. It must leave them perfectly functional I.e. able to compete but not OP. Go.

Relics that have rules that are tied into the faction/chapter identity instead of being a +1 chainsword. Points have to be rebalanced when Chapter Tactics, Armour of Contempt and Angels of Death is removed anyway so it's not a lot of extra work for playtesters.

No, you said with 30 minutes you could manage better than combat doctrines, all you did here was shrug and delegate.

Are you talking about the post you quoted earlier where I said that with 3 hours (not 30 minutes) to update Custodes (not SM) the designer (not me) shouldn't add Martial Katahs and Shield Host Fighting Styles? Some rules just shouldn't be in the game, Gretchin should not have Armour of Contempt, asking someone to come up with an alternative for Armour of Contempt for Gretchin is silly because the right answer is that if Gretchin ever got Armour of Contempt it should be removed as fast as possible with no replacement.

So AoS is my main game and the one where I have expertise. I can read a new release and sort things into 'obviously OP/UP' 'maybe OP/UP' and 'somewhere in the middle' with a high degree of reliability. This is not a particularly noteworthy achievement; many others can do the same. But I often cringe when I am reading previews done by people who clearly are not experienced with the army they are reviewing, or even AoS as a whole.

Later on, when people say that these balance issues are hard to predict, they point to those reviews and to other opinions of people who were clearly not qualified to make such calls. But that doesn't negate that for people who are experienced many issues become obvious just from the reading. People understand that balance will really never be good and that sometimes obscure exploits slip through, but there is a difference between that and what GW releases.

I know that for people with 40k expertise it is the same thing. The people who didn't see the obvious OP/UP thing are people who were never qualified to make that call. 'Easier than walking' is obvious hyperbole and treating such a claim seriously IMO gives it more legitimacy than it deserves, but at the same time there is no justification for balance being as bad as it is when qualified experts would literally line up to volunteer re-balance point costs before release.

 vict0988 wrote:

Dudeface wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

Dudeface wrote:
...you have 30 minutes to propose an alternative to doctrines and by extension super doctrines for space marines and all relevant chapters. It must leave them perfectly functional I.e. able to compete but not OP. Go.

Relics that have rules that are tied into the faction/chapter identity instead of being a +1 chainsword. Points have to be rebalanced when Chapter Tactics, Armour of Contempt and Angels of Death is removed anyway so it's not a lot of extra work for playtesters.

No, you said with 30 minutes you could manage better than combat doctrines, all you did here was shrug and delegate.

Are you talking about the post you quoted earlier where I said that with 3 hours (not 30 minutes) to update Custodes (not SM) the designer (not me) shouldn't add Martial Katahs and Shield Host Fighting Styles? Some rules just shouldn't be in the game, Gretchin should not have Armour of Contempt, asking someone to come up with an alternative for Armour of Contempt for Gretchin is silly because the right answer is that if Gretchin ever got Armour of Contempt it should be removed as fast as possible with no replacement.

I misread 3 hours my bad, the use of the term combat doctrines also threw me off. I'm not bothered either way on the banana rules but I do agree some of them seem to exist for the sakes of it.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
So AoS is my main game and the one where I have expertise. I can read a new release and sort things into 'obviously OP/UP' 'maybe OP/UP' and 'somewhere in the middle' with a high degree of reliability. This is not a particularly noteworthy achievement; many others can do the same. But I often cringe when I am reading previews done by people who clearly are not experienced with the army they are reviewing, or even AoS as a whole.

Later on, when people say that these balance issues are hard to predict, they point to those reviews and to other opinions of people who were clearly not qualified to make such calls. But that doesn't negate that for people who are experienced many issues become obvious just from the reading. People understand that balance will really never be good and that sometimes obscure exploits slip through, but there is a difference between that and what GW releases.

I know that for people with 40k expertise it is the same thing. The people who didn't see the obvious OP/UP thing are people who were never qualified to make that call. 'Easier than walking' is obvious hyperbole and treating such a claim seriously IMO gives it more legitimacy than it deserves, but at the same time there is no justification for balance being as bad as it is when qualified experts would literally line up to volunteer re-balance point costs before release.

Even people who DO know the army and DO call how OP/UP something is are: A. Often wrong and B. Almost never correct about the degree to which something is OP/UP.

Example: I play Daughters of Khaine. When the 2nd DoK battletome came out, it was immediately obvious to me that Witch Aelf based armies had been SIGNIFICANTLY nerfed and that, in fact, most of the army's melee ability had been paired down. In my mind, this left Morathi 15 Bow Snakes as the only viable build in the book.

No one in DoK spaces agreed. The consensus was that the book was actually somewhat better for melee (though I don't understand to this day how they believed that) and while Morathi builds were likely the strongest, there would be room for plenty of other options.

They were wrong. Morathi 15 Bowsnakes was SO MUCH BETTER than anything else the army could do that you could play 1500pts vs 2000pts and still win.

But I was ALSO wrong. I thought that the nerfs Morathi and Bowsnakes took would be enough to make it just barely viable and not really a contender. It ended up being about 55% winrate.

Identifying good and bad is easy, identifying HOW good and HOW bad is very hard.

ERJAK wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
So AoS is my main game and the one where I have expertise. I can read a new release and sort things into 'obviously OP/UP' 'maybe OP/UP' and 'somewhere in the middle' with a high degree of reliability. This is not a particularly noteworthy achievement; many others can do the same. But I often cringe when I am reading previews done by people who clearly are not experienced with the army they are reviewing, or even AoS as a whole.

Later on, when people say that these balance issues are hard to predict, they point to those reviews and to other opinions of people who were clearly not qualified to make such calls. But that doesn't negate that for people who are experienced many issues become obvious just from the reading. People understand that balance will really never be good and that sometimes obscure exploits slip through, but there is a difference between that and what GW releases.

I know that for people with 40k expertise it is the same thing. The people who didn't see the obvious OP/UP thing are people who were never qualified to make that call. 'Easier than walking' is obvious hyperbole and treating such a claim seriously IMO gives it more legitimacy than it deserves, but at the same time there is no justification for balance being as bad as it is when qualified experts would literally line up to volunteer re-balance point costs before release.

Even people who DO know the army and DO call how OP/UP something is are: A. Often wrong and B. Almost never correct about the degree to which something is OP/UP.

Example: I play Daughters of Khaine. When the 2nd DoK battletome came out, it was immediately obvious to me that Witch Aelf based armies had been SIGNIFICANTLY nerfed and that, in fact, most of the army's melee ability had been paired down. In my mind, this left Morathi 15 Bow Snakes as the only viable build in the book.

No one in DoK spaces agreed. The consensus was that the book was actually somewhat better for melee (though I don't understand to this day how they believed that) and while Morathi builds were likely the strongest, there would be room for plenty of other options.

They were wrong. Morathi 15 Bowsnakes was SO MUCH BETTER than anything else the army could do that you could play 1500pts vs 2000pts and still win.

But I was ALSO wrong. I thought that the nerfs Morathi and Bowsnakes took would be enough to make it just barely viable and not really a contender. It ended up being about 55% winrate.

Identifying good and bad is easy, identifying HOW good and HOW bad is very hard.

Yet what you didn't mention proves my point; it went entirely without saying which subfaction is getting used. It's so obvious it wasn't even worth noting. At any rate, I'll ask for citation on 'no one in DoK spaces agreed' because that seems a pretty suspect claim to me. And tbh? Anyone who did not see that immediately did NOT know AoS or the army, period. It isn't even a prediction to say that a mechanic which has always been OP will continue to be OP.

Edit: I actually went back to the old DoK thread on TGA; people were calling out Morathi + Sisters while the tome was on preorder.

Also to translate this into 40k terms; imagine a 12 wound flying monstrous creature with a very solid melee profile, casts 3 psychic powers at +1, can't take more than 3 wounds per turn, and it unlocks a stratagem to let a friendly unit shoot or fight in the command phase, 600 points.

I think this discussion is maybe missing the bigger picture- whether it's true or not that any halfway competent player could spot imbalances, we have the luxury of a completed codex to look at without time pressure.

In an ideal world GW would draft a set of rules, playtest it internally, revise it, send it out to playtesters, get feedback, incorporate revisions into a new set of rules, and repeat the process. This would continue until they're happy with it and everything is thumbs up from playtesters, and then it is ready for typesetting and goes off to print.

In the real world, while I don't know exactly what GW's process looks like, I can say with absolute certainty that there isn't enough time for that ideal process at the current rate of codex releases. I've never seen a company- regardless of industry or product- that is doing such discrete user-testing revisions while under time pressure. More likely they draft a set of rules, send it out to playtesters while also playtesting internally, incorporate feedback from playtesters as well as their own thoughts, do another round or two, and when they get it 'good enough' then final changes are made and it's turned over for printing. Along the way there are dozens of moving parts and it may be easy to undercorrect or overcorrect, and there may be things that are recognized to be problems through further testing before the print product even hits the shelves. Not to mention since this is being done many months before release, the game is actively changing while they are testing how the new codex fits into it, and the game will assuredly change further in the time between when development is locked down and when the new book hits shelves.

Can someone with a good knowledge of the game spot overpowered or underpowered options after it goes to print with a bit of math analysis? Sure. Can you do the same during testing, juggling twenty different simultaneous changes from the latest round of feedback, targeting a state of balance that is constantly changing, predicting what things will be like in a couple of months? That's a bit tougher. Comparatively, videogames have it easy with the sheer ease of distribution, quantitative metric reporting, and relatively discrete additions (eg a single new character for League).

So I mean, GW's print media schedule constraining development is certainly part of the problem, but it's not the only factor. And how easy it is to spot balance issues with a complete codex isn't particularly relevant to the development process. The best way to improve balance on release wouldn't be to appoint a Dakkanaut to review, it'd be to ease up the release schedule, and design (and test) the game in bigger chunks than a single codex at a time releasing to an ever-changing game state. GW's shown that when they design a system from scratch- index 8th, Apocalypse, many of the specialist games- they can do a pretty decent job of balancing it. It's this constant codex churn that screws everything up; likely all that having someone with more game knowledge or understanding of probability would add is more day 1 patches.

As someone who has spent countless hours play-testing far more detailed rule sets, I can say that, yeah, you can spot these things during the testing process.

IMO, it comes down to the process of testing, that being whether GW is really doing it in a comprehensive fashion.

Results seem to say that they're not.

 catbarf wrote:
In the real world, while I don't know exactly what GW's process looks like, I can say with absolute certainty that there isn't enough time for that ideal process at the current rate of codex releases.

How would adding a 4-week final competitive revision change the update schedule? Not several rounds of tests, just one big test involving all the competitive playtesting groups working together to provide feedback. It should slow down the first codex being released by 4 weeks, but after that as it becomes part of the schedule it shouldn't slow down production of the next codex because the final changes should be done in a day while the rest of the time the team can be working on another codex. I just want one round of casual testing for which new mechanics to implement and which old ones to get rid of, an Indian from Fiverr to do some spreadsheet analysis to make a good points draft for the codex and one round of competitive testing to balance mechanics and points costs. This is not an insane ask. GW does not use spreadsheets and they don't have a final competitive test with all the rules they want to have in the codex (like D3+3 dark lances).

Not to mention since this is being done many months before release, the game is actively changing while they are testing how the new codex fits into it, and the game will assuredly change further in the time between when development is locked down and when the new book hits shelves.

GW needs a balance anchor unit A is worth X points and that should never change and the game should be balanced around that unit, balancing around an unstable foundation is a big problem. GW should only release beta rules like giving Necron Destroyers CORE once a year and should playtest it as part of a points update along with the playtesting of codexes currently in development such that everything has been tested together.

...how easy it is to spot balance issues with a complete codex isn't particularly relevant to the development process.

It is relevant because if it really was a question of one guy sitting down and reading the rules once and fixing everything then codexes would all be perfect unless that person had nefarious purposes, this all plays into the conspiracy theories prevalent in the community.

The best way to improve balance on release wouldn't be to appoint a Dakkanaut to review, it'd be to ease up the release schedule, and design (and test) the game in bigger chunks than a single codex at a time releasing to an ever-changing game state. GW's shown that when they design a system from scratch- index 8th, Apocalypse, many of the specialist games- they can do a pretty decent job of balancing it. It's this constant codex churn that screws everything up; likely all that having someone with more game knowledge or understanding of probability would add is more day 1 patches.

Index 8th wasn't balanced. Did anybody try to spam Brimstone Horrors during testing? Certainly, nobody did the math on (Lokhust) Heavy Destroyers or Gauss Pylons. The beginning of 9th wasn't balanced despite GW releasing a new set of points for every faction at the same time, which should be all that is needed since even if a WL trait/Relic combo on a Succubus is OP relative to a base Succubus or any other combo if the price of a Succubus is 200 then it is (mostly) fine. But GW's 9th edition points was a massive half-assed flop and ruined the edition despite some really stellar changes to the core rules. Bundling things together only matters if someone does the math and competitive players try to break the game before release using the final rules. 9th should have been released a year later with every single unit going through 2 rounds of being spam-tested 3+ times and the game balance should be locked around Gretchin being worth 5 points and every future faction should be as strong overall as Orks.

 vict0988 wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
In the real world, while I don't know exactly what GW's process looks like, I can say with absolute certainty that there isn't enough time for that ideal process at the current rate of codex releases.

How would adding a 4-week final competitive revision change the update schedule? Not several rounds of tests, just one big test involving all the competitive playtesting groups working together to provide feedback. It should slow down the first codex being released by 4 weeks, ...

That's why.
They want to sell models and post good financial results at the end of the quarter or fiscal year.
Not only those 4 extra weeks would need to be filled by something else in the pipeline, but un-balance sells. Check how frequently OP stuff is sold out for weeks after a book drops.
Maybe it's not done on purpose, but when it happens that they missed something and a unit turns out to be OP, it sells. So why change it? They know they can fix it a few weeks or months down the line.