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 Hellebore wrote:
The discourse I see these days is so very reductive and egocentric. Moreso than it used to be, and this is from people who have been in the hobby for decades, not some ephemeral 'generation' ruining gameplay.

This I place at GW's feet for literally being reductive in their game design in the name of simplicity.


It basically comes down to, if your opponent's dudes do something you can do, but better, the feels bad starts to rise in people's gorges. Being incensed that your army isn't the protagonist and best at what it does seems to be a lot more prevalent than it used to.

That feels pretty reductive of newer gamers.
Some of them aren’t chill. Most are-I’ve welcome people into the hobby and they’re usually good sports, winning and losing either with grace.

I specifically said it was coming from older players, not just the new ones.

That’s on me for not reading it closely.
I’m at work, but I should’ve paid more attention.

My bad!

The most fun armies to play agaisnt tend to be the ones that dont stop you playing the game the way you want to.

So if you want to be killy people that never die are not fun, if you want to move a lot being boxed in isnt fun and so on.

Winning but not being able to do what you want with your army is often less fun than losing but being able to do the things you want to do.

No worries. My thrust was that the way GW is designing the game and promoting it is affecting people's way of interacting with it which is where a lot of this angst is coming from.

They are overly simplifying it, reducing options and over amping some factions (space marines) which sets a tone that people expect the game to provide and justifies reacting negatively to not getting it.

 carlos13th wrote:

Winning but not being able to do what you want with your army is often less fun than losing but being able to do the things you want to do.

Totally. I'm a Crusader, and I'd rather complete agendas and faction goals to grow my army and advance the story than score victory points to win games.

That said, many Agendas DO focus on objectives, so sometimes achieving an agenda does lead to VP.

Preventing me from achieving agendas and faction goals is the way to frustrate me- like when somebody prevents me from completing a non-VP agenda instead of going for the VP I left on the table- that's frustrating... though if they're doing it because they're aware of your narrative and they're interacting with it, that can be cool. If they're just doing it to pee in your corn flakes, that's not so fun.

It is weird to me that people find a game designed around conflict and opponent denial frustrating when they're denied...

Your opponent's objective is to stop you doing what you want to do. ESPECIALLY if you're good at it, because letting you be effective at things you're good at is a recipe for losing.

This is what I'm talking about. It just boggles me entirely that your opponent being effective at opposing you is considered legitimate grounds to be upset or angry.

That is literally the point of the game. If you don't like that you need to play PVE games instead.

@Hellebore :

Not sure how much of that is a direct response to my post, but if it is, you may want to reread my post. Perhaps I wasn't clear, but the situation I'm describing is one of trying to achieve a non-victory-point agenda (ie. one that does not involve direct interaction with objectives, and can't possibly contribute to me "winning" the game), and having an opponent go out of his or her way to prevent me from achieving it, even at the expense of objectives that may help them win the game.

Even then, it only bothers me if the opponent is doing it to be a pain in the ass: if they're actually participating in the narrative, and they're aware of the ongoing story and they choose to thwart me for narrative reasons, that's fine.

In point of fact, my opponent's objective is usually to win, not to stop me from achieving a narrative action during the game that brings me no closer to winning and pushes my opponent no further from it. Again, if my opponent to tries to stop me rather than trying to win, they're either engaging with the narrative (which is fine), or they're trying to piss me off... In which case, they often succeed.

It's a pretty rare edge case, and it's a far cry from being angry or upset that my opponent is effective at opposing me- it has far more to do with someone choosing to get in the way of a story that they are not participating in when there is little or no upside for them to do it.

And of course, if you weren't referring to my post, feel free to ignore the clarification.

It was a bit you and a bit carlos as you were replying to them.

If you know your opponent is trolling you to be a dick, I can understand that.

But your opponent stopping an imperial army doing imperial agendas, or an eldar army from doing eldary spirit stone rescue/artefact fiddling etc is exactly what your opponent would be doing. So much of the flavour text in the codexes is this type of thing - the imperials are trying to rebuild an altar and their chaos opponents defeat them and crap all over the altar in mockery. Or the eldar are desperately trying to rescue some spirit stones and their opponent flies them away to keep them out of reach.

All 40k factions are xenophobic trolls, delighting in spiting their enemies. So long as the player isn't doing this in a way that is clearly them hating on you personally, it's kind of in keeping with how 40k factions operate in general.

 Hellebore wrote:
The discourse I see these days is so very reductive and egocentric. Moreso than it used to be, and this is from people who have been in the hobby for decades, not some ephemeral 'generation' ruining gameplay.

This I place at GW's feet for literally being reductive in their game design in the name of simplicity.


It basically comes down to, if your opponent's dudes do something you can do, but better, the feels bad starts to rise in people's gorges. Being incensed that your army isn't the protagonist and best at what it does seems to be a lot more prevalent than it used to.

I agree and disagree. First of all, I don't think this behavior is limited to veteran players, but it is for sure more prevalent with them. It's hard to break habits and question truths that you have fostered for a years, so it's understandable that something feels off when you point the same unit at those same ork models you have been facing for a decade and the suddenly don't disappear anymore. What I personally don't understand that the logical conclusion more often than not seems to be to complain about the fact, rather than adapting to figure out how to kill orks in this new edition.

I also strongly disagree that this is due to the game having become more simple. Rules have become more simple, but the game, while being played, for sure hasn't. This is actually another problem I see veteran players struggle with. Selecting the right targets has become both much more important and much more difficult at the same time. Movement blocking, scout/infiltrate tactics, obscuring, less advance and shoot and fast units being much weaker than before has made movement much more difficult than in previous editions when most of the movement was about getting into or staying out of combat. And, of course, stratagems.
Most seasoned players I play, who struggle with 10th, usually are struggling with either target selection, movement tactics or using their stratagems at the right time (or at all) and lose almost every game as a result. They essentially got bounced back to rookie status, and don't understand why they suddenly stopped winning. The obvious solution is blaming the other person's army, especially if it's an NPC army like orks




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 carlos13th wrote:
The most fun armies to play agaisnt tend to be the ones that dont stop you playing the game the way you want to.

So if you want to be killy people that never die are not fun, if you want to move a lot being boxed in isnt fun and so on.

Winning but not being able to do what you want with your army is often less fun than losing but being able to do the things you want to do.

True, one of the paradoxes of game design. One of the MtG designers wrote an article about that many years ago, probably around the time I joined dakka.

In strategy, the most efficient way of winning is disruption. Disrupting the enemy plans is always more fruitful than furthering your own plans. And people hate having their carefully laid out plans disrupted, even if that plan is "I charge my everything into their everything".

In 40k, you can also add "I want to kill things" and "I don't want my stuff to die" to the same paradox.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Hellebore wrote:
It is weird to me that people find a game designed around conflict and opponent denial frustrating when they're denied...

Your opponent's objective is to stop you doing what you want to do. ESPECIALLY if you're good at it, because letting you be effective at things you're good at is a recipe for losing.

This is what I'm talking about. It just boggles me entirely that your opponent being effective at opposing you is considered legitimate grounds to be upset or angry.

That is literally the point of the game. If you don't like that you need to play PVE games instead.

It's not that simple, it's just human nature. Not everyone is able to emotionally distance themselves from what is happening in the game, and in the end we have hobbies to feel good.

Disruptions is something many people do not take kindly to. MtG had entire disruption mechanisms removed from the game (land destruction) because they were hated so much, and there is good evidence suggesting that the main reason why LoL became so popular over DotA2 is the lack of a mechanic to deny gold to enemy characters.
I've seen people literally flip the board in Risk because I kept disrupting their continent bonuses, and know people who did not talk to each other for weeks over game of Catan because one person took away a resource the other needed to build a city, despite not needing it.

 Hellebore wrote:
It is weird to me that people find a game designed around conflict and opponent denial frustrating when they're denied...

Your opponent's objective is to stop you doing what you want to do. ESPECIALLY if you're good at it, because letting you be effective at things you're good at is a recipe for losing.

This is what I'm talking about. It just boggles me entirely that your opponent being effective at opposing you is considered legitimate grounds to be upset or angry.

That is literally the point of the game. If you don't like that you need to play PVE games instead.

I agree. Stopping the opponent from gaining Victory Points often is as or even more effective in achieving victory as gaining Victory Points yourself. That's how all games with interaction work. There are games designed to minimise this, like some euro games where players mostly concentrate on optimising their own engine and there's a race who does it better in the alloted time, but it is a rare case a game will have none of that at all (even in a low-interaction euro game there's usually an option to for example block an action spot or take some resources not to benefit from it but to stop your opponent from benefiting, because it fits their strategy too well ...and then there are those high-interaction euros that rival wargames in how tooth and nail they are).

I think the issue is usually that there's no counter to the counter?

Disrupting my plans is fine - providing I can in turn disrupt yours. But often you just can't?

I mean in something like MTG (and its been years), if my opponent has some blue/black removal deck that's just countering everything I do, then it feels like I'm reduced to an enemy AI for the other opponent to deal with. Sure sometimes their deck will just fail - but its not because I've done anything especially well.

You can obviously abstract this. Is someone going pure green, "small guys buff big guys who trample to win" really so different? Arguably the game will still come down to which cards you draw etc - but it feels like you could have stopped them. There was scope for interaction that wasn't really there in the above.

Its like playing into an old-school gunline that just castles up in the opposite corner of the board. There's not much of a strategic counter. You can try and optimise your positioning - but for the most part you just had to run forward for 3 turns and see what gets picked up and what doesn't. If they roll well, they win. If they don't, they probably lose. Do you really want to spend an hour or two finding out?

Yes, that's why I originally wrote that armies (decks, strategies in other games) that limit interaction are most often considered unfun by their opponents.

Most players come to play, win or lose. If an army doesn't necessarily stop me from winning but it stops me from playing then it can be reasonably said it is unfun.

Doesn't do your things and counter enemy is what any wargame are? I mean I have a plan, and want it done. and i don't want my opponent do his shady things. For relatively balanced armies this counters is a proper way to win and it's most interest thing. we deffinitely can go into meatgrinder in middle but thats fun for few times.

And in mtg im that guy with blue black counterspell deck. There is 2 of us in club at that time and we regularly stagnate against eachother on local tournaments. And some how(i thing orgs do that) we matched one against another like 6 out of 10 times

A blue-black deck of today is nowhere near what blue-black (or pure blue decks) were 20 or more years ago. Those decks were literally able to prevent you from casting a single spell in an entire Bo3 set if they drew well enough.

Foiling your enemies plans by reacting to their action is interaction, and generally a good and well perceived thing. If I charge my ork boy mob into your dudes holding an objective and they die, I have foiled your plan, but there would be a number of things you could have done about that - or it might even be part of your game plan and those boyz are dead next turn.

When a unit of super-buffed 8th edition lootas blow up your biggest model from across the board and there is absolutely nothing you can do about that, you will feel bad. And they will do so again next turn, because there is no real counter against that outside of shooting all the lootas off the board faster than they wipe out anything of value. This would then be non-interactive.

Cyel's point is that when an army is simply durable as feth and your army can't hurt them, you get the same feeling that nothing you do matters, while the death guard/knights player just executes their plan unhindered as if your army wasn't there.

My games against the Death Guard have felt very fluffy. They play like I was reading a novel about the Death Guard.

I drop 15 Scions loaded with overheating plasma, hot-shot lasguns, grenades, and a volleygun or two right next to some Death Guard.

I hit on 2s, and reroll 1s.

I unleash hell upon the Traitors.

Who take it and will melt my best troops next turn.

I'd rather go up against Knights than Death Guard.

I have nothing against the lifelong Death Guard players. Sometimes your codex is a little op... and I understand that.

What makes games and certain armies unfun, is when the player knows the army is op, leans into the near broken aspects of the force, and is very talkative about how broken his army is.

Jidmah wrote:A blue-black deck of today is nowhere near what blue-black (or pure blue decks) were 20 or more years ago. Those decks were literally able to prevent you from casting a single spell in an entire Bo3 set if they drew well enough.

Foiling your enemies plans by reacting to their action is interaction, and generally a good and well perceived thing. If I charge my ork boy mob into your dudes holding an objective and they die, I have foiled your plan, but there would be a number of things you could have done about that - or it might even be part of your game plan and those boyz are dead next turn.

When a unit of super-buffed 8th edition lootas blow up your biggest model from across the board and there is absolutely nothing you can do about that, you will feel bad. And they will do so again next turn, because there is no real counter against that outside of shooting all the lootas off the board faster than they wipe out anything of value. This would then be non-interactive.

Cyel's point is that when an army is simply durable as feth and your army can't hurt them, you get the same feeling that nothing you do matters, while the death guard/knights player just executes their plan unhindered as if your army wasn't there.

Just don't allow your opponent do anything but place lands. I think it's 15 years ago I last time played MTG. Then just sold whole collection.

There always some uninteractive component. Like lootas or tigurius with centurions, or any other broken thing. And it's fine I guess, cause this is war, things can't be even for all, or there is no war at all if you know you have parity.

Lathe Biosas wrote:My games against the Death Guard have felt very fluffy. They play like I was reading a novel about the Death Guard.

I drop 15 Scions loaded with overheating plasma, hot-shot lasguns, grenades, and a volleygun or two right next to some Death Guard.

I hit on 2s, and reroll 1s.

I unleash hell upon the Traitors.

Who take it and will melt my best troops next turn.

I'd rather go up against Knights than Death Guard.

I have nothing against the lifelong Death Guard players. Sometimes your codex is a little op... and I understand that.

What makes games and certain armies unfun, is when the player knows the army is op, leans into the near broken aspects of the force, and is very talkative about how broken his army is.

That a challenge every proud warrior of Imperium shall overcome! Doesn't our(IG) troops always have problem with power armor? And high T. We have nice thing called manticore with it's beautiful
Storm Eagle rockets to harass fat infantry from very far. And it's more like you need russes or dorns to deal with DG and knights. Or artillery teams, FOB and hwt if you prefer to play infantry, even they aren't popular. And don't forget sentinels. Don't play against DG this edition, but think it should be nice Last stand for guards.

 Hellebore wrote:
It is weird to me that people find a game designed around conflict and opponent denial frustrating when they're denied...

Your opponent's objective is to stop you doing what you want to do. ESPECIALLY if you're good at it, because letting you be effective at things you're good at is a recipe for losing.

This is what I'm talking about. It just boggles me entirely that your opponent being effective at opposing you is considered legitimate grounds to be upset or angry.

That is literally the point of the game. If you don't like that you need to play PVE games instead.

I think for me there is a huge difference between a game not being very fun and a being angry. A game where your opponent manages to block you in so you can’t really move your minis might not be the most fun game ever but you shouldn’t be angry at your opponent for playing effectively. It’s a game I don’t understand getting angry about it.

For me the most fun games in wargames, board games and video games are where both parties get to try to do various things where you both have highs and lows and the finish if close and doesn’t feel like a foregone conclusion from the start.

That said I’ve had very fun games where I’ve got my ass kicked from moment one but it’s been amusing, funny or felt cinematic in some way.

The 'feels bad' argument for games mechanics has been thrown around the community for the last 5 years or so as a way to justify taking mechanics from some factions, or controlling how opposing forces get to interact with your force.

It really constrains the thinking of game design and it's why we have such reductive game mechanics now where it's just T, W and Sv that can be used for survival.

The idea that -1 to hit is more feels bad than only wounding on a 6 puts people's feelings above good game design and variety.

and even when you have two identical armies facing each other, marine players still want to be the one that's better at killing their opponent and tougher than them, but when their opponent is marines it will never satisfy them.


IMO people need to completely reset their game expectations if they don't want to be emotionally affected by their opponent being a challenge.

More people need to adopt the cultural attitude ork players have about the game, rather than being uptight about how their opponent is or is not giving them a 'good' game.

kabaakaba wrote:
Just don't allow your opponent do anything but place lands. I think it's 15 years ago I last time played MTG. Then just sold whole collection.

I was talking about old cardframe times, before ravnica but after combo winter (and yes, I'm that old).
When raffinity almost killed off the game for a second time, WotC learned a thing or two about interactive gameplay and vastly cut down on unfun mechanics like counter spells, land destruction and discard to make sure there was never more than one or two effective ones of those in a given format. They also learned a thing or two about combos, another non-interactive way of playing.
I remember entering a tournament the short, horrible time when both raffinity and umezawa's jitte were legal in standard going undefeated against 6(!) identical raffinity decks with a stupid rats deck (*waves at the skaven fans*) for second place, for the sole reason that no one knew how to handle a deck which forced them to interact with the opponent instead of comboing on auto-pilot.

There always some uninteractive component. Like lootas or tigurius with centurions, or any other broken thing. And it's fine I guess, cause this is war, things can't be even for all, or there is no war at all if you know you have parity.

If this were war, I wouldn't be bothering with dice. It's a game, played for the enjoyment of both parties. It's the most important thing one should never forget when playing 40k.

That a challenge every proud warrior of Imperium shall overcome! Doesn't our(IG) troops always have problem with power armor? And high T. We have nice thing called manticore with it's beautiful Storm Eagle rockets to harass fat infantry from very far.

That beautiful rocket is going to kill a single plague marine or blight lord if it can see the unit without cover, and fails to kill even a single deathshroud on average.
If you are shooting indirectly, might as well not bother.

And it's more like you need russes or dorns to deal with DG and knights

That's the stat check they are talking about. Those tanks actually are good at blowing up DG units, but DG units are also good at blowing up or neutralizing them. If you didn't pack tanks (or don't own enough) there isn't much you can do.

Or artillery teams, FOB and hwt if you prefer to play infantry, even they aren't popular. And don't forget sentinels. Don't play against DG this edition, but think it should be nice Last stand for guards.

I actually played against a beautiful army which looked exactly like that, rows of infantry, command squads, artillery and ordnance teams, veteran squads with all sorts of plasma and hotshots weapons, and let me tell you... those weapons are unpopular for a reason. After the artillery and plasma cannon sentinels were down, there was nothing left to challenge any of my units. My opponent had literally lost the ability to influence the result of the game.

 Hellebore wrote:
The 'feels bad' argument for games mechanics has been thrown around the community for the last 5 years or so as a way to justify taking mechanics from some factions, or controlling how opposing forces get to interact with your force.

It really constrains the thinking of game design and it's why we have such reductive game mechanics now where it's just T, W and Sv that can be used for survival.

The idea that -1 to hit is more feels bad than only wounding on a 6 puts people's feelings above good game design and variety.

and even when you have two identical armies facing each other, marine players still want to be the one that's better at killing their opponent and tougher than them, but when their opponent is marines it will never satisfy them.


IMO people need to completely reset their game expectations if they don't want to be emotionally affected by their opponent being a challenge.

More people need to adopt the cultural attitude ork players have about the game, rather than being uptight about how their opponent is or is not giving them a 'good' game.

While I think you're right that some players need to adjust expectations and others will confuse their own subjective preference for objective criticism, it does feel like you might be conflating "I don't like x" with "x is genuinely unenjoyable to play against". There's that quote about writing - "when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong" - which feels like it might be applicable here, and I'm not sure we gain much by ignoring all "feels bad" arguments as motivated reasoning with a specific goal in mind (especially if the removal of "feels bad" mechanics is not done at the request of the players, but due to GW being lazy/bad at improving and choosing to throw out a mechanic entirely rather than trying to fix it).

Because the bar for feels bad and the universal ability to communicate that dissatisfaction removes any sense of 'objective' measurement of the 'goodness' of rules.

You can find complaints about virtually every aspect of the game, if you treated them all as true it would degenerate into rock paper scissors and people would still say rock is unfair.

There is a balance between poor game implementation and personal emotional dissatisfaction. I blame GW for their poor communication to their customers on what to expect from the game. Setting expectations correctly means people don't see 'feels bad' as a problem but a challenging feature. Most of the disgruntlement is due to perception of rules and factions, rather than those rules having some objectively poor implementation.

It is IMO a mix of interactivity (non interactive armies, be it super powerful or super weak, horde stat check armies etc), personal taste and what ever the army has the ability to mess up your own army rules. Tastes are different and being non interactive are both bad enough on their own, but if your army is "I invalidate X" and your opponents army is "the theme of my army is X", the game is going to be 0 fun vs a stranger, it may even not be very fun to play vs someone who is friend or family.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Hellebore wrote:

There is a balance between poor game implementation and personal emotional dissatisfaction. I blame GW for their poor communication to their customers on what to expect from the game. Setting expectations correctly means people don't see 'feels bad' as a problem but a challenging feature. Most of the disgruntlement is due to perception of rules and factions, rather than those rules having some objectively poor implementation.

The rules writer should either know that A an army that is early 10th eldar should not exist. B an army that is early 10th ad mecha should not exist either. As both are unfun to play against, and one is unfun to play with.
Then there is question of play styles. If you design an army to do only X, lets say it is a melee stat check army, and then you release armies that easily pass that check, then you are creating a situation, where the person that bought in to the army with X in mind is not going to have much fun playing the army, and the fun would get less the more armies in his local meta are of those "pass check X" type.
And the last thing is the problem with commonality. Like it or not GW has created different factions of marines, and if something exists for decades you can not just turn it in to a shoulder pad or 2-3 rules extra (or rather you can, but you are going to have a lot of people being unhappy). This gets worse, when separate factions are put in to the same codex. An ultramarines player is going to have more or less fun in 10ed, depending on how good marines (ultramarines) are doing. Meta changes are going to be made to "fix" up or down his army etc. Great for him. Meanwhile a White Scar or Crimson Fist player will ask , why is his army going to be fixed and the community will tell him that marines(ultramarines) are fine, sometimes even too good. And I don't think anyone can say that a WS player that started to play WS is having much fun in 10th ed.
There is also this odd thing, especialy from players that have been in the hobby for decades. "You have shape your own hobby" , "Playing is not the hobby" ."If you play play the game the right way (no is the right way to play Ad Mecha robots or biker WS in 10th)" and the good old "It has been like that in the past, and everything comes around". Those are things that only have impact on others playing for decades. If I were who just spent all his money on an army then I don't want to wait from 8th ed to 10th or 11th for my army to work. In fact I was that kid.

So fun is not relative, and not just in the "eye of the beholder". And yes GW could go out and say, that they don't care about their buyers "fun", especialy after they buy stuff from them, but they probably won't do that. But what GW could do is not to add to their the video game "pay for not having to expiriance unfun" mechanics. Invalidation of rules, rules bloat. DLC style content that you have to use else you can't play/won't have fun. Pre build armies all those things shouldn't exist and they hurt their new players the most. And in way It makes sense how GW games went from "for teen boys" in old pictures to "for 35+ men". If someone like me is the youngest at the store it speaks volume about the state of GW retention of players game.

I think for most of us it is fun to watch a smarter opponent counter our moves with their own creative and cunning moves

It is less fun if an opponent does so without muh effort on their part because game designers happened to give him hard counters ona silver platter as innate abilities.

Karol wrote:
It is IMO a mix of interactivity (non interactive armies, be it super powerful or super weak, horde stat check armies etc), personal taste and what ever the army has the ability to mess up your own army rules. Tastes are different and being non interactive are both bad enough on their own, but if your army is "I invalidate X" and your opponents army is "the theme of my army is X", the game is going to be 0 fun vs a stranger, it may even not be very fun to play vs someone who is friend or family.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Hellebore wrote:

There is a balance between poor game implementation and personal emotional dissatisfaction. I blame GW for their poor communication to their customers on what to expect from the game. Setting expectations correctly means people don't see 'feels bad' as a problem but a challenging feature. Most of the disgruntlement is due to perception of rules and factions, rather than those rules having some objectively poor implementation.

The rules writer should either know that A an army that is early 10th eldar should not exist. B an army that is early 10th ad mecha should not exist either. As both are unfun to play against, and one is unfun to play with.
Then there is question of play styles. If you design an army to do only X, lets say it is a melee stat check army, and then you release armies that easily pass that check, then you are creating a situation, where the person that bought in to the army with X in mind is not going to have much fun playing the army, and the fun would get less the more armies in his local meta are of those "pass check X" type.
And the last thing is the problem with commonality. Like it or not GW has created different factions of marines, and if something exists for decades you can not just turn it in to a shoulder pad or 2-3 rules extra (or rather you can, but you are going to have a lot of people being unhappy). This gets worse, when separate factions are put in to the same codex. An ultramarines player is going to have more or less fun in 10ed, depending on how good marines (ultramarines) are doing. Meta changes are going to be made to "fix" up or down his army etc. Great for him. Meanwhile a White Scar or Crimson Fist player will ask , why is his army going to be fixed and the community will tell him that marines(ultramarines) are fine, sometimes even too good. And I don't think anyone can say that a WS player that started to play WS is having much fun in 10th ed.
There is also this odd thing, especialy from players that have been in the hobby for decades. "You have shape your own hobby" , "Playing is not the hobby" ."If you play play the game the right way (no is the right way to play Ad Mecha robots or biker WS in 10th)" and the good old "It has been like that in the past, and everything comes around". Those are things that only have impact on others playing for decades. If I were who just spent all his money on an army then I don't want to wait from 8th ed to 10th or 11th for my army to work. In fact I was that kid.

So fun is not relative, and not just in the "eye of the beholder". And yes GW could go out and say, that they don't care about their buyers "fun", especialy after they buy stuff from them, but they probably won't do that. But what GW could do is not to add to their the video game "pay for not having to expiriance unfun" mechanics. Invalidation of rules, rules bloat. DLC style content that you have to use else you can't play/won't have fun. Pre build armies all those things shouldn't exist and they hurt their new players the most. And in way It makes sense how GW games went from "for teen boys" in old pictures to "for 35+ men". If someone like me is the youngest at the store it speaks volume about the state of GW retention of players game.

My understanding was that GW have exactly turned the different chapters of marines into just a shoulderpad, and maybe some special characters. I didn't think there were specific rules for different chapters any more, outside of the different detachments where one is quite siege-y so is effectively Imperial Fists, one is flame-weapon-y so is effectively Salamanders and so on. Afraid I don't know enough about how SMs are playing at the moment to know what is the problem with White Scars compared to Ultramarines.

What I think should really not be in the game is where Faction-X is specced as Anti-Faction-Y - the only one I can think of is your Grey Knights being anti-Daemon. It appears to be greatly reduced in 10th (is it just Voldus' Hammer Aflame power that works better on daemons now?), but when a faction is specifically tailored against one other faction that is a balancing nightmare. Are they costed based on the perks they get against that one other faction, meaning they're under-powered against everyone else? Or are they costed based on their general power level, meaning they are over-powered against that one faction? Either way is a bad, unfair match-up.

Crispy78 wrote:

Karol wrote:


. Afraid I don't know enough about how SMs are playing at the moment to know what is the problem with White Scars compared to Ultramarines.

What Karol is referring to here is that 1st born bike/scout bike/attack bike/various speeders/some 1st born characters on bikes became Legends units here in 10e.

These had formed the bulk of WS players armies since WS got special rules waaay back in 4e.

Karol continues to ignore 2 facts concerning playing WS this edition:

1) pick the bike/speeder oriented detachment & then spend around 1500 pts on the various Primaris bike/speeder/atv/mounted character options.
Fill in remaining pts with ______.
You can make a decent army out of this.

2) outside of tourney play Legends are still valid units. So says GW.
(If you are having issues using Legends outside tourny play, you need to be having serious discussions with those you play with.)

Crispy78 wrote:
Either way is a bad, unfair match-up.

More importantly, its not even fun for either player (assuming the advantaged player is looking for a game and not a win).

 Hellebore wrote:
The 'feels bad' argument for games mechanics has been thrown around the community for the last 5 years or so as a way to justify taking mechanics from some factions, or controlling how opposing forces get to interact with your force.

It really constrains the thinking of game design and it's why we have such reductive game mechanics now where it's just T, W and Sv that can be used for survival.

The idea that -1 to hit is more feels bad than only wounding on a 6 puts people's feelings above good game design and variety.

and even when you have two identical armies facing each other, marine players still want to be the one that's better at killing their opponent and tougher than them, but when their opponent is marines it will never satisfy them.


IMO people need to completely reset their game expectations if they don't want to be emotionally affected by their opponent being a challenge.

More people need to adopt the cultural attitude ork players have about the game, rather than being uptight about how their opponent is or is not giving them a 'good' game.

I agree to a point. However, I would argue that it definitely is an issue when an army (or substantial elements of it) can be countered at the list-building stage.

Are we seriously saying it's fun for one player to take a list with a decent number of anti-infantry guns, only to wind up playing against an Imperial Knight army? At which point a substantial chunk of his army is reduced to being nothing more than ablative wounds for the anti-tank guns.

 vipoid wrote:
I agree to a point. However, I would argue that it definitely is an issue when an army (or substantial elements of it) can be countered at the list-building stage.

Are we seriously saying it's fun for one player to take a list with a decent number of anti-infantry guns, only to wind up playing against an Imperial Knight army? At which point a substantial chunk of his army is reduced to being nothing more than ablative wounds for the anti-tank guns.

Depending on the player, it's fine.

My list has...

GUO with a S10 Strike melee weapon, a S7 Plague Flail, and S5 vomit
Two Princes with S8 Strike melee weapons and effectively a Heavy Bolter each
Poxbringer with a S5 Balesword
Plague Drones with S5 Mount attacks
Literally every other weapon is S4 or less.

Most all of them have Lethal hits, but when it's almost all AP-1 D1... I cannot effectively kill Knights.
But I still like playing them, because I like to focus on victory conditions over killing.

That said, I definitely understand that my feelings aren't universally shared in this aspect.

Yeah it's never entirely on one side or the other, but society tends to polarise things into false dichotomies for ease of telling things apart (either things are actually poorly designed, or people are useless at telling the difference and rely on how they feel).

It's going to be bit of both, but using how something 'feels' to determine its objective balance is a flawed methodology and I don't really like seeing it used as a conventional wisdom reason for objecting to how an army or mechanic works.

It's ok to have a super tough army, so long as those armies that aren't have means of beating them. It's ok to have a hard to hit army, so long as other armies can still beat them.

The idea of a challenge to your ability to do things in itself shouldn't be reason to remove a game mechanic.


I feel like if old Pinning rules reappeared in 40k now there would be an uproar about how unfun it is to not be able to do something with your unit because it failed a Ld test. When just killing the models does the same thing. Having more than just removing models to affect their actions is a great thing. Everytime I look at current 40k, it just looks like it was designed to be marines punching marines to get maximum enjoyment from the rules as they currently stand. Playing anything else just works against the biases in the game itself.