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Crispy78 wrote:
That said, there have definitely been examples where it has been admitted that things have been overpowered or under-costed to drive sales, eg the eldar wraithknight on it's initial release...

Do we have any other known examples? The Wraithknight is one, but I don't recall any others where we know there was meddling to drive sales.

Umbros wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

Dudeface wrote:
Can some one explain why there are so many mediocre to poor books released if this is the case then?

What book hasn't made mark in top tournaments upon release? GSC and...?

Necrons, Thousand Sons, Death Guard (maybe), CSM, both Knights, Daemons, Templars...

Necrons did quite well when they were released. So did knights. And I see CSM at top tables as well. Daemons are still doing well. 57% which is 2nd highest...

You just proved yourself to have no clue if you claim daemons are poor book when they have 2nd highest win rate atm. ROOOOOFFLMAAAAAOOO!

Yea right. 2nd biggest win rate is poor. Hahaha. What? Every book needs to have 70% winrate to not be poor?

Imperial knights 6th at 55% now. Anybody have stats what they were when they were released? (since the win rate early up is what matters for this question. Necron/dg winrates now is irrelevant for question at hand)

Necron did not do "good" when 9th started. Excluding things like salamanders aggresor builds being okey for a week or two, the top was harlequins being a tier of their own, then custodes, followed by orcs, Whitescars and the rest of the armies struggle to be50% win rate, with many not making it in to tier 2. Among which were armies like tau, knights, IG, demons etc.



Or is the good or quite well, limited to being that in crusade?

Asenion wrote:


And just by coincidence these overpowered releases just happen to sell more products and increase profits?

Poor, naive, innocent GW sounds like the victim here. How could us horrible people dare to consider GW's motives to be anything less then pure?

To think anyone would ever lie or cheat out of greed or to make lots of money...why that's just uncharitable good sir!

You might want to learn how to read friend.

New models are pretty often very bad, rules wise.

Either GW is not very good at it, if they try to make all new things OP on purpose OR they are so proficient that it works out on their spreadsheets without anybody noticing a proper pattern.

@OP sounds a bit like you clearly made up your mind already on the topic and don't want to hear other thoughts.

As with all projects a lot depends on what the person wants to do, what he can do and what the company wants them to do.

Some books are release and forget. Put the stuff we think there should for the edition, cover the models we produce and we are done. There is model line resets or even new line being started. Which will always be a lot of work, and by virtue of that. You can get many thing. Things the devs think is "cool" like GSC, and then the whole spectrum of pre nerf Votan and pre buff necron.
There is marines, which are more or less copy pasted. And then there is eldar which never had a bad book, and always end up being super powerful.

But GW does do models, generaly big models that they can cost high, with crazy initial rules. Son of Behmat, the eldar knights, Castellans, Silent king, even when the necron themselfs were meh. The rest seems mostly random or pure studio likes/dislikes. Some stuff like custodes, feels like it is being made in a specific way, so that people can't optimise the army for both games, unless they magnetize everything.

Ah and in general people don't care much, if a faction gets or doesn't get good units. Unless they don't like the faction to begin with. What people do not like is something like castellan, which turns to entire meta in to a castellan meta, and any imperial army in to a first take a castellan army.

Lammia wrote:


'Never atribute to malice, that which can be sufficently explained by stupidity.'

GW have only recently begun to try and really understand how their game plays out 'in the wild.' The whole 'conspiring to sell new models' ignores the large number of models that manage to be truly unplayable on release as well as some of the oldest kits having some of the best rules at times.

This.

I have seen many armies or new, huge and expensive models DOA gaming-wise and I have seen absolutely broken things that needed immediate nerfing to be made playable. Both of these things happening interchangeably tells me the designers have poor understanding of how their game actually works and are just designing things with their gut feeling.

a_typical_hero wrote:
New models are pretty often very bad, rules wise.

Either GW is not very good at it, if they try to make all new things OP on purpose OR they are so proficient that it works out on their spreadsheets without anybody noticing a proper pattern.

@OP sounds a bit like you clearly made up your mind already on the topic and don't want to hear other thoughts.

New models tend to sell well anyway by being new. It's once initial rush is over the sales by power helps to get the tournament try hards to buy them in their chase of "glory"

I think there's a soft connection.

GW has a clear tendency towards power creep in the way they write their rules. This has applied to every edition of 40k and WHFB I can think of. I imagine it applies in AoS but not really played it so can't confirm.
This tends to happen because they make up brand new rules, make existing rules fewer points and fix "problems in the meta" (that existed 9ish months ago when the book was being finalised) but don't go back to fix older books. To that end more recent codexes will "tend" to be more powerful than earlier ones. They'll have more options and get more for their points.

I think GW has this tendency towards creep partly because they want to sell new stuff - and so can't reach some point of "balanced stasis" - where they just sell new sculpts of existing units. They know from a marketing perspective, people who play all the time (which includes the vocal, professional wing) get bored of a stale meta. People like variety and change. I remember when I was playing a lot in late 2018 I got sick of "knight meta", where every other opponent seemed to have a knight. (And in turn, your army had to have the tools to crack knights, or risked being dead on arrival.) It was only 9 months or something - but it felt like 9 years.

I imagine people last year got sick of my DE being top dog for about the same length of time.

But equally, GW doesn't care which grey plastic sells - so long as it sells. Plenty of completely new kits get awful rules. You can end up in a stupid place of arguing "GW has made this new unit OP to sell - but made this other new unit rubbish so it will sit on the shelves until its buffed in 3 years time." Which is kind of dubious as a sales strategy. In the same way plenty of books have been put out which are just weaker than others - or have whole sections that are are mathematically terrible.

Tyel wrote:
GW has a clear tendency towards power creep in the way they write their rules. This has applied to every edition of 40k and WHFB I can think of. I imagine it applies in AoS but not really played it so can't confirm.
This tends to happen because they make up brand new rules, make existing rules fewer points and fix "problems in the meta" (that existed 9ish months ago when the book was being finalised) but don't go back to fix older books. To that end more recent codexes will "tend" to be more powerful than earlier ones. They'll have more options and get more for their points.

Well let's see. ATM it is:

Tzeentch(4th newest)
daughters of khaine(7th)
beast of chaos(old book though got WD update in january/february which was HUGE buff going from one of the worst to one of the best armies...)
seraphon(old book, WD update bit over year ago)
lumineth realm lords(tied 2nd/3rd newest)
vampires(old book with almost year old WD update)
gargants(tied 2nd/3rd newest)
ogors(tied 2nd/3rd newest)
kharadron overlords(old book, got WD update around summer)
nurgle(3rd book in this edition)
stormcast(edition opening book)

And so on.

Half the top-6 haven't even got new book and newest books atm are outside top-6.

AOS is surprisingly light on power creep with newer books. The new slaves might make quite an impact when it comes out properly though. Those punch silly hard. Though points are quite high.

But equally, GW doesn't care which grey plastic sells - so long as it sells. Plenty of completely new kits get awful rules. You can end up in a stupid place of arguing "GW has made this new unit OP to sell - but made this other new unit rubbish so it will sit on the shelves until its buffed in 3 years time." Which is kind of dubious as a sales strategy. In the same way plenty of books have been put out which are just weaker than others - or have whole sections that are are mathematically terrible.

It might look stupid but what player has cash to buy entire army's whole collection at once? Trible feed him OP unit after OP unit rather than make everything same at once.

Depends on what the goal for a faction model line up is . Bad rules for a unit, or worse an entire faction when a new model update goes live, that is droping the ball by GW design studio. Necron are like that.

Primaris being bad and getting a bad after bad update doesn't matter as much, if the end goal is to reset the whole space marine line without getting an AoS style backlash for it.

I can't even imagine how much drive and in studio strenght would someone have to have to convince the higher ups to do something like a plastic krieg squad. Too much it worked for 3-4 decades, we are not going to change it

And kind of a explains why AoS is more in the mid kind of a game. It is true that they sometimes drop the ball hard, because some stuff was not tried yet, by GW at least. But in general it is interesting. And AoS seson system is much better. It actualy makes people change their army set ups and want different unit, which is important for model sells. In w40k you are stuck with armies that just don't cut it or cut extremly well. For smaller armies this means that after buying the initial 2000-2500pts there realy is no entice to buy more. But it gets really bad with the big model factions, like the marine ones. Sure the codex comes with 1000+1 units, but what is worth taking is maybe 4-5 of them.

It would be interesting if GW had something like a monster or walker seson, then a transport seson, then an infantry seson etc Would make people that have those models happy, and those that don't have them willing to buy them.

Jarms48 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Possibly.

The problem is it's very hard to tell because they're so awful at writing rules that they could be trying to make something powerful and still completely mess it up.

This, just look at the Sister codex. The new hotness was the Castigator Tank and the Paragon Warsuits. Both were absolute trash. The Paragon only got good after getting a point drop and AoC, while the Castigator is still terrible.

Castigator is good actually. It's a masterclass in how to drive sales. First you release very pretty, hot garbage units, then 12-24 months later you drop their points that that actually start to appear in comp lists.

Sisters Codex also clearly proves that GW had no clue how original Bodyguard worked on the table (doubly so with multi-model characters) and just threw a "cool/fluffy rule" onto a unit that ended up being a competitive "no brainer" for the first 6 months or so, completely derailing the game in a good number of match-ups.

They also made Paragons immune to damage 1 weapons, because *insert Homer Simpson gif*, but simultaneously fine-tuned their points and rules to become slowely more viable over another year or so of balance datasheet rules they allegedly had planned out in advance?

Don't think so.

tneva82 wrote:

Umbros wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

Dudeface wrote:
Can some one explain why there are so many mediocre to poor books released if this is the case then?

What book hasn't made mark in top tournaments upon release? GSC and...?

Necrons, Thousand Sons, Death Guard (maybe), CSM, both Knights, Daemons, Templars...

Necrons did quite well when they were released. So did knights. And I see CSM at top tables as well. Daemons are still doing well. 57% which is 2nd highest...

You just proved yourself to have no clue if you claim daemons are poor book when they have 2nd highest win rate atm. ROOOOOFFLMAAAAAOOO!

Yea right. 2nd biggest win rate is poor. Hahaha. What? Every book needs to have 70% winrate to not be poor?

Imperial knights 6th at 55% now. Anybody have stats what they were when they were released? (since the win rate early up is what matters for this question. Necron/dg winrates now is irrelevant for question at hand)

Are they overpowered? Being at top tables doesn't matter, if they compete fairly then no they're not OP.

Flamers are atm pretty much most busted unit.

And 57% which is 2nd highest is well above 50%...And way above armies with 45%. Is it fair to have 57% vs 45% army? If you say yes then your view of fair is pretty bad. (also how much you perform at the absolute top is even better indicacation in general than just win rate)

As is codex: daemons is reason why tzeentch is silly high at over 70% win rate.

GW doesn't need to make Codexes OP to drive sales because the company makes good models that people want to buy. In fact I'd wager the rules actively harm sales of certain models, especially considering how leaky the the rules department seems to be these days.

You would be suprised how many people buy the models to play the game. Not many people that like the model, buy 9 void weavers or buy out dark eldar raiders online.

 Gert wrote:
GW doesn't need to make Codexes OP to drive sales because the company makes good models that people want to buy. In fact I'd wager the rules actively harm sales of certain models, especially considering how leaky the the rules department seems to be these days.

Agreed. I'd say people overestimate the impact rules have on sales of specific models. People that follow the new hotness are a minority in the tournament crowd which in itself is a small minority of the 40K community.

I'd say GWs rules are more a problem of lack of passion for some factions and little engagement with the game from the rules writers. It's not like in lotr where you see the rules writers being an active part of the community. What playtesting achieves is probably corrections of wordings that simply don't work in the current rulebook because I think these have gotten rare since 8th/9th edition while there were pretty common before (see Heldrake formation in 7th that did practically nothing because obviousely who made up that rule didn't really know how the turn sequence in 40K worked). Balancewize the FaQs are more important than the actual codex, which is probably eyeballed without much knowledge of the overall game. In 9th it's possible to compare groups of Codizes with each other that have been released side by side, but there's a divide nevertheless.

When they wrote the Tyranids codex they didn't remember what they wrote in the DG codex because it's just a job and once you're finished with a book you don't look back...

Karol wrote:
You would be suprised how many people buy the models to play the game. Not many people that like the model, buy 9 void weavers or buy out dark eldar raiders online.

I really wouldn't because the number of people who buy models to Meta chase are a tiny fraction compared to those who buy models to just build and paint.

@SgtCortez
Agreed.

If GW wanted to drive sales with rules, they might end up doing crazy things like putting out chaos rules for the Kratos tank (or any of the other lovely new HH plastics for that matter), or stop gatekeeping FW stuff behind the Imperial Armour book/martial legacy tax.

The codex release cycle takes so long to complete that anyone on the back end of it has a lot of making up to do.

And yes, they probably do selectively buff some stuff from time to time.

If GW want to sell things "to the bulk of players" based on being overpowered, the "rules cycle" needs to be much longer.

In the olden days the best stuff tended to remain at least good for years. The bad stuff also unfortunately tended to remain bad. This prompted a bit of "if you can't beat them, join them".

Today anything that looks broken tends to get nerfed in 1-2 months. I doubt GW sold very many voidweavers at all - because it was instantly clear they were getting an axe for their 6 weeks at the top. Flamers are in the same place now. People who sprinted out to buy two Malceptors were kidding themselves and the list goes on.

 Gert wrote:

Karol wrote:
You would be suprised how many people buy the models to play the game. Not many people that like the model, buy 9 void weavers or buy out dark eldar raiders online.

I really wouldn't because the number of people who buy models to Meta chase are a tiny fraction compared to those who buy models to just build and paint.

@SgtCortez
Agreed.

If that was true GW would be making models for painters and builders. Yet all they do with how the game looks, the models are cut etc is not being build or paint friendly. And again painters don't buy whole armies every quarter seson or more often. It may change when 3d printing goes full capacity and the war ends. But hey everyone is allowed to have a view on things. No matter who it is, there is a group of people between 10 to 15% who are buying 80% of all models and out of those a 1-2% are buying 80% of those 80%.

No

We have many codexes that were mediocre if not subpar on release with new units that were just plain bad.

Meta chasers are also a small minority in the grand scheme of things. If GW was all about maximizing profits they'd just release the hot new gak for Space Marines and nothing else.

 Gert wrote:

Karol wrote:
You would be suprised how many people buy the models to play the game. Not many people that like the model, buy 9 void weavers or buy out dark eldar raiders online.

I really wouldn't because the number of people who buy models to Meta chase are a tiny fraction compared to those who buy models to just build and paint.

@SgtCortez
Agreed.

Also its my observation that a lot of people who meta-chase at the competitive end are often fully aware that the meta can shift fairly quickly and because they are only meta-chasing they tend to keep their costs down. So they buy secondhand models off ebay; they buy collections being sold on facebook. They paint strip, repaint or even send the armies off to get repainted etc.... Basically they are generating very little actual money for GW itself. So if GW were chasing the meta-customers it like as not wouldn't be reflected with actual sale.s


Thing is wargames take TIME not just money. Building and painting take time and most people don't pay others to do that for them. So many customers will only have a limited number of armies or even just one army. So if that army has rubbish rules that's money lost from that customer for GW. It's why the old rules system of slow updates was a net loss for everyone - armies like Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar missing editions over and over again and resulting in fewer and fewer sales weren't translating to those players buying other whole armies all the time. It resulted in them being far more likely to drift away from the game because their army and collection wasn't being supported well.

Warhammer isn't MTG and it can't do a whole meta-chase system and benefit anyone really. Ideally flat balance where most armies can perform well both between armies and within a codex/battletime will produce hte greatest sales. Because you'll have the greatest number of customers open to buying models for their armies. When only one army is outright THE BEST then only collectors of that armywill be charged up to buy it and many people will not just swap and dump for that army.









As to the main question I can cite many examples where GW has had overpowered new models - Slaanesh got overpowered summoning for their leader models when GW updated the leaders (and when the best setup was lots of keepers of the brand new keeper model); Ossiarchs were insanely overpowered with a +1 save to every model in the army with one subfaction. And yet as others have noted for every time GW does that they muck up somewhere else. There's a new model or new army that underperforms; or a big army that sells well that suddenly gets a rubbish hand dealt them.
In the end GW aren't masters of balance and its more likely the fact that sometimes stuff is over or under powered because that's just how they are with regard to balance. It not being helped by the fact that right now every 3 years they throw all the balance work they've done out the window and start over with a fresh rules set.

Karol wrote:

If that was true GW would be making models for painters and builders. Yet all they do with how the game looks, the models are cut etc is not being build or paint friendly. And again painters don't buy whole armies every quarter seson or more often. It may change when 3d printing goes full capacity and the war ends. But hey everyone is allowed to have a view on things. No matter who it is, there is a group of people between 10 to 15% who are buying 80% of all models and out of those a 1-2% are buying 80% of those 80%.

what? GW models are more than servicable to paint, and are some of the better plastic miniatures on the market. Yeah, theres some weird undercuts because of injection molding's 'weaknesses' but theyre still very nice miniatures.

Not for the price, and not when you can buy the resin ones for 1/3 or 1/2 of a price. the new IG for example were being mass printed here, before the official premier of the models by GW. Which I found extremly funny by the way.
And we maybe big on 3d printing, but no where comperable to what Russia was before the war started. I would be very suprised if GW was selling much in eastern europe in 5-10 years. Things like custodes and HH is already made out of printed armies, to make insult to injury bigger, better quality then FW.

So 3d printing and selling models way under the market value can work - so long as the person doing the 3D printing isn't playing taxes, monitoring their expendators for wear and tear; not paying themselves an hourly wage etc...


The 3D print stores I see selling way under are often not doing their books and running a business, they are doing hobby "work" and many will burn out once the initial hype wears off; of they trade just enough to only earn ehough to buy a bit of resin for themselves here and there.

The ones actually doing a proper business and such tend to be not far off regular model prices from cast models. Because those models are also produced for tiny amounts per model, but all the upkeep, etc....... is where the money goes.


When you buy a model much of the money you spend isn't on the individual materials and production of just that one model for you; its all the upkeep, company, wages, staff, shipping (even if its free it gets paid for somewhere) etc... .

I did not vote. As everyone else I could only speculate and speculation isn't fact and no base for action.
I don't care at all why GW does anything. The only thing that matters is the quality of the product. To me the quality of the product is good enough to have some fun gaming with friends, but not good enough to play it just because of the game itself, for example with random people I don't know.
The product GW provides is definetly not good enough and absolutely not reliable enough to spend much money on it. Therefore I cut down on expenses while not cutting down on playtime with friends.
I rarely buy models made by GW and instead bought a 3d printer I also use for other game material for other games.
I don't spend money on any book made by GW. I don't think I will ever again.

Why the product is what it is, isn't important to me, if I knew nothing would change about the product itself. Only thing I have to decide is if to me it's consumer benefit is big enough to spend money on it.

Karol wrote:

 Gert wrote:

Karol wrote:
You would be suprised how many people buy the models to play the game. Not many people that like the model, buy 9 void weavers or buy out dark eldar raiders online.

I really wouldn't because the number of people who buy models to Meta chase are a tiny fraction compared to those who buy models to just build and paint.

@SgtCortez
Agreed.

If that was true GW would be making models for painters and builders. Yet all they do with how the game looks, the models are cut etc is not being build or paint friendly. And again painters don't buy whole armies every quarter seson or more often. It may change when 3d printing goes full capacity and the war ends. But hey everyone is allowed to have a view on things. No matter who it is, there is a group of people between 10 to 15% who are buying 80% of all models and out of those a 1-2% are buying 80% of those 80%.

There's a huge number of people outside the categories of "meta chaser" and "only buy to paint". Gert is correct, the vast majority of players fall into the category of regular players who aren't interested in chasing the meta and that's where most of the sales come from. There's no need for GW to overpower new releases because people will buy the new stuff anyway.

As to the OP's question he obvious answer is no. I don't think GW understand their game well enough to overpower things deliberately. For every broken release there's a complete dud, especially when you look at new models rather than at the Codex as a whole. I don't think there's ever been a Primaris model released that was broken when it first came out, for example. Them last wave of Sisters models were terrible on the tabletop. Same withj Eldar - Banshees and Jain Zar are hardy tearing up the meta.

I think there's a general upward curve in power level, but that's more down to GW's inability to rein in their own creativity and actually design an edition rather than a series of individual books. Even at that, the trajectory is not a simple upward-pointing line of increasing power.

We know that GW have deliberately made new releases overpowered in the past; and I see no reason to believe that they'd have stopped doing that just because NuGW have a Twitter account or whatever.

Whether they make entire books overpowered is another matter.