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 MinscS2 wrote:
The pts-adjustments are waaay to harsh. The fact that even Thunderkyn (a unit no one has complained about because they where so meh) got hit with a 5ppm increase shows that they have no clue what they're doing and is simply acting in a panic before more events bann LoV. "Nerf everything, quickly!"

The change to autowounds counting as 6s is something I support, BUT with the added change that all the weapons with triggers on 6s to wound instead trigger on 6s to hit. With the new change, these triggers will more or less never procc on units with 3 JTs, which makes no sense from neither a fluff/logical PoV nor a rules PoV.
"We've built up a real grudge against that unit, now our weapons are less powerful!?"

These changes are half-assed, overdone and rushed. I predict that LoV will be a low-tier army untill some of them get reverted.

The entire point of the change was to reduce that synergy.

Also lol, lmao thinking Votann will be a low tier army because of these changes.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 Arbitrator wrote:
But they made a funny video! They said they're listening! I love NuGW!

I just can't get this out of my head now.

This came to mind

EviscerationPlague wrote:
Now let's continue the ban/boycott to prove a point. Nobody buys their rhetoric of "oh we totally tested against other codices" garbage.

I'm sure they did, and I'm sure they did before those codices received their own much needed nerfs. The problem is they're still pushing power to sell figures so over time as the community rebels against previous entries and they get toned down, the gap gets wider. Every new book is +1 or so to the book before it, and eventually gets some of that cut back, but since they're designing the next book to be +1 to that, eventually get a +7 release after the +5/+6 books have had their emergency nerfs back to only being +2/+3 better than the codices from the start of the edition.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Games Workshop wrote:We've got a devoted rules team, and an amazing group of playtesters, but even after a rigorous testing period, sometimes we miss things that a passionate world-wide community of hundreds of thousands will quickly spot.

I don't believe you.

I don't believe that a group who has been doing this one thing for this long can be so bad at this at such a consistent level.

Yeaahhh......how many decades of practice do they need? The company has been doing 40k rules for 35 years now, and wargame rules in general for longer. You'd think that they'd have some sort of system by now. I find it hard to believe that they don't know just how strong things like auto-wounding mechanics are at this point.

Companies themselves don't have memory and experience though, just those working in them. GW pay too little to maintain rules people for long, as they don't seem to consider it a core part of their offering. Hence the same mistake are made over and over and the work is continually done by people with limited experience.

GW admits clear as day in the WarCom article that LoV were only tested against current books like Aeldari (probably Drukhari) and Tyranids.

This is an insight into GW's internal play testing and it's abysmal to say the least.

It highlight how codex creep happens and why it gets progressively worse as the edition goes on.

Weren’t all the play testers fired following leaks?

 GaroRobe wrote:
Weren’t all the play testers fired following leaks?

Yes... and other speculative reasons.

But it's also speculated that this book was being worked on before the external play tester terminations and was only ever going to be tested in-house to prevent leaks.

Anyone else get a vague sense that the video is the WarCom guys going 'this crap gets shoved out by devs who don't know what they're doing and we have to clean up the mess'?

At any rate I do appreciate the video, I do appreciate the change. It is better than nothing, a LOT better. But I hesitate to accept the apology without evidence things will be any better in the future.

Would it be better to be testing against the codexes that come out during the first six months of each edition in order to keep to a baseline?

You do wonder if there is some truth hidden behind the jokes in the video.

"I have to give codex Zoats an army wide 2+ invulnerable save. No I have no idea what it means either."

Perhaps someone is sick of fixing rules for a single game designer who has a flimsy grasp on the game mechanics and/or maths.

 Souleater wrote:
Would it be better to be testing against the codexes that come out during the first six months of each edition in order to keep to a baseline?

That would be sensible, in an ideal world they should test against any in-print at time of testing books & whatever else is in parallel development. That simply isn't possible in the time it would take and the cost it would be for the staff to do the testing. They've shown time and again that external testers don't respect their requests to keep things confidential so not shocked that avenue isn't looked into any more.

Being an optimist I'm hoping they took the route they did because they felt they were concerned with the functional aspect of the books and making sure they were "fun" rather than "balanced", then thought they better understood the state of the game than they do.

More likely someone in charge has no idea wtf they're doing and just said "we're making these 3, cut costs and balance against each other"

EightFoldPath wrote:
You do wonder if there is some truth hidden behind the jokes in the video.

"I have to give codex Zoats an army wide 2+ invulnerable save. No I have no idea what it means either."

Perhaps someone is sick of fixing rules for a single game designer who has a flimsy grasp on the game mechanics and/or maths.

"You're going to keep buying this barely tested, broken, overpriced crap no matter what and some of you will still think our self-referencing jokes about it are funny."

 GaroRobe wrote:
Weren’t all the play testers fired following leaks?

Which happened so lately couldn't matter as book was done and produced by then. Leadtimes.

 Souleater wrote:
Would it be better to be testing against the codexes that come out during the first six months of each edition in order to keep to a baseline?

It begs the question, what did they test Imperial Knights, Chaos Knights, Chaos Space Marines and Chaos Daemons against? They were all significantly weaker than release Dark Eldar, Custodes, Craftworlds (are Harlies), Tau, Tyranids and Votann.

I find this wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_(Warhammer_40,000)#9th_Edition to be very helpful in visualising this kind of question, as the testing "buckets" claim/theory still doesn't really make much logical sense to me. It seems like a really poor deliberate design choice to make.

 bullyboy wrote:
So my group are doing a Crusade starting Oct 1st. What about Power Level? Surely some of these points increases warrant a PL change too?

PL is only updated once a year, otherwise too many people get their panties into a bunch about PL stealing their valuable development time.

If you use the Warhammer app, does everything get updated automagically or do I still have go and track down all the FAQs?

Thev get added there sooner or later

 Necros wrote:
If you use the Warhammer app, does everything get updated automagically or do I still have go and track down all the FAQs?

Automatically assuming you own the book and entered the code.

 Jidmah wrote:

 bullyboy wrote:
So my group are doing a Crusade starting Oct 1st. What about Power Level? Surely some of these points increases warrant a PL change too?

PL is only updated once a year, otherwise too many people get their panties into a bunch about PL stealing their valuable development time.

1 second spent on PL is 1 second too many to begin with

Dudeface wrote:
That simply isn't possible in the time it would take and the cost it would be for the staff to do the testing.

well, not that GW is the company having the money needed and they can take any time they need to do it
it is not like the must release a new untested faction now because otherwise they are going bankrupt or the community going bonkers because the Space Dwarfs are not released in 2022

no one new that they were coming, so no one cares of they are out now, in 6 months or 2 years
they just don't want to spend the money on it (has nothing to do with possibilities) as people are going to buy it anyway no matter how bad the rules are

Points up on everything is probably a bit overboard, but most of the votann units were just a little bit too points efficient before. They also didn’t remove the actual auto wound mechanic, just the part that generated the most absurd combos. They should still be strong but not nearly as likely to table enemy armies. While I’d wish that they’d figured this out three or so months ago before this book went to print, I’m at least glad they put this out before the most pushed wave 2 minis came out (beserks, land fortresses).

First impressions of this change overall are that this is pretty in line with other game companies with equivalently complex games. Definitely a bigger mistake or miscalculation than the average cause otherwise they’d not have felt the need to release a news article about it, but getting ahead of the crisis is better than destroying both competitive and casual markets for their new release.

 kodos wrote:

Dudeface wrote:
That simply isn't possible in the time it would take and the cost it would be for the staff to do the testing.

well, not that GW is the company having the money needed and they can take any time they need to do it
it is not like the must release a new untested faction now because otherwise they are going bankrupt or the community going bonkers because the Space Dwarfs are not released in 2022

no one new that they were coming, so no one cares of they are out now, in 6 months or 2 years
they just don't want to spend the money on it (has nothing to do with possibilities) as people are going to buy it anyway no matter how bad the rules are

Their investors care, their design team care, they need to release something so it was one codex or another.

Regards possibilities, if you played each faction against votann in each mission from the nephilim pack, you're looking at 225 games. That's (allowing time for note taking and report writing) 787.5 hours at 3.5 per game. Standard 7.5 hour working day, that's 105 days for 2 people, just to check each mission for 1 game against each book and mirror matches.

No it isn't possible for them to thoroughly test everything.

It is possible. They just don't want to spend the resource, or organise some kind of Warhammer Playtest Festival where they could get an infinite number of playtesters willing to help them out for free.

yeah, so GW would need 5 months for playtesting if they are doing the minimum with 2 people, or 2 months for 6 people

given that you need the full 3.5 hours to find out that rules are broken and not tabling an army within 1 hour

and this need to be done anyway as they need the data to actually write their yearly balance update

yeah, so 2 months work to get 2 very important products right which are the main selling points of the main product

or skip it, throw gak on the wall because there are enough people saying that it is not possible anyway and pay for bad rules because the models look nice

Well, they've apparently learned not to blame the player base, the way they did with the Iron Hands and some of those supplements.

As weak and sad as this screw up is, it sounds a little better than 'we didn't expect you to use the rules this way' [as written].

But still. This is a nice addition to the tally of failure.

Drong wrote:
Funny video, but what does he say at around 1:51 "And Molly is supposed to be alive at christmas anyway"?

Thought he said "Im only supposed to be alive at Xmas" which makes more sense considering he doesnt get trotted out very often.

tneva82 wrote:

 GaroRobe wrote:
Weren’t all the play testers fired following leaks?

Which happened so lately couldn't matter as book was done and produced by then. Leadtimes.

That’s what I mean. Didn’t they lose all their experienced play testers?

Kind of reminds me when Kirby wanted Wraithknight to be OP, so everyone would buy it. This time though, it's being managed by 'nu-GW', who sincerely, honestly, care about gamers and want all the best for them. Definitely not caring about their profits, nor creating illusions, to make sheeple think they are looked after

We all shoud ask a refunt for the lov codex.

Seems good.

Competitive-minded people can actually challenge their skills (a little)

Fluff-/Dwarf-loving people can enjoy the army without automatically being "that guy" as a collateral.

Non-Dwarf-playing people can at least pretend they have a chance for 2 or 3 rounds.

GW apologizes for an obvious mistake.

Win-win all around. Well done.