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So in my club, we have a big crowd of Age of Sigmar players who come from a previous club that was only focused on hardcore competitive play in Age of Sigmar (specifically that). Their previous club died because of internal conflicts but also the fact they had trouble recruiting new players - because they were not interested in anything other than hardcore competitive play of AoS (meaning no campaign, no other format than 2000 points with last season of war rules, no interest in playing special scenarios / lists than the standard ones used in tournaments, and so on).

They come along more or less well with the rest of the club (that is open to all kinds of games, not just GW ones) and some are receptive to other games or ways to play, but their core is still mindlocked on AoS. So they mostly play with each other in their small internal group.

It's difficult not to notice there is a focus on competitive scene from main miniature game companies, GW being obviously one of the most famous but there are as well Para Bellum, Privateer Press and Mantic Games to speak just of them. GW in particular tend to be much more receptive on that matter with FAQ and erratas coming out more often than a few years ago, sometimes at a pace that is considered overwhelming by casual players and fans of other ways to play.

This honestly leads me to think more and more : is focusing on the competitive scene really good for the survivability of a game and even a community in long term, even nowadays ? Or is it more a question of ideology from game designers who come more often from the tournament scene than before ?

I'm asking myself that because of the history of above AoS tournament players in my club ; they are indeed a constant crew who play regularly, but they are mostly the same people and there's not many new players in their group nor do they attract new players that much to play with them. They're usually the same blokes playing with each other and attending the same local / country tournaments. Moreover, recently, we started an AoS campaign that is "new player friendly", for we are starting with small armies that grow up as the week pass on, and we had some of those tournament players participating - which is welland all, but...they did come with optimized armies and were playing with their "tournament setting" behavior. So of course, when some of them met some newcomer armies that were, let's say not really that optimized...the games were quite fast and not really fun for the newcomer.

As persons, all of them were friendly and honestly genuine in their joy to play with new people, but they didn't get the purpose of the campaign at first. So it led for some newcomers not to come back for the next week.

I'm not really throwing the stone at them, to be clear. They were simply playing the way they always played with each other, and in their mind, tournament play IS the best way to enjoy AoS. So to them, there's a specific way to play the different factions and TBH they're very open to teach newcomer how to build their list in the best way possible and all. But that doesn't lead to especially fun games.

It made me remember the time of when Warmachine was considered "the best game around" compared to 40k and Battle, because of its very "tight written rules" and "competition mentality by default". And the famous "page 5", of course. Nowadays, Warmachine is a shadow of its former past, nowhere close to the top game sales. And there's the tragic story of Guild Ball who was full focused on competitive play and finally shut down with a note blaming their failure on the very choice of focusing on competitive play.

When I talk with the AoS hardcore tournament crowd in my club, I realize they almost focus all their free time in that - in a way close to Esport, because they're training with their list to be the most familiar, keep up to date with the last FAQs / erratas and the current meta and carefully plan their purchases so that everything is ready for the next trendy tournament. It sounded like a second job in more than one way, and I even had some of them who were saying they felt a bit "burnt out" sometimes because of the pace GW recently put on new rules / erratas / season of war. They sure are busy.

But from a newcomer perspective, when they understand all that, it's not really that appealing. Not only it's an expensive hobby, but it's very time consuming...and the question can be asked to know where's the fun when it becomes somewhat of an obligation. I talked a bit with some newcomers who weren't interested to keep going after that meeting with the AoS competitive scene...most of them just say it's just not fun, it's not a game anymore. They were also saying they were repelled by the huge amount of "game data" to absorb just to be up to date with all the seasons of war, erratas, FAQs or even points that are not "valid anymore" sometimes as soon as the book is actually out.

Even from sales perspective, I'm not that sure focusing on competitive play really boost them that much. Maybe some shop owners can tell their feeling about it ?

So in the end, what's the real impact of a too big focus on competitive play on our game communities ? Is it positive or negative on long term ? What happens when the competitive scene repel the "casual players" by trying to impose their way to play as the only worthy one to play (well, I guess we already know that with the experience of Guild Ball and Warmachine) ? I guess it's a question of perspective...and also game ideology, depending on what you think is the best way to play a game (narration vs optimization, balance vs special scenarios, points vs historical lists, and so on). But I'm interested to see what's the situation in your own club or, maybe if I'm lucky, perspective from game designers who lurk on this forum on that matter. Do you feel that focus is more or less palatable amongst the game companies you're following ? Is is too much or actually relevant ? What leads to that from a game designer's perspective ?

I think there's a few layers to this to unravel and a simple "is tournament play good or bad" is too broad a concept to really appreciate the elements within.


1) The company end of the game. I'm going to say flat out that if the company focuses on tournament play from an angle of ensuring that armies are well balanced against each other and have good internal balance so that each army has more than one viable competitive build - then it is an all round GOOD thing no matter how you play the game.

Tight rules that are well written with flat balance so that any well build army can face off well against another is a good thing for competitive, casual, custom or whatever kind of play the players want.


The BAD kind of competitive play focus is where the parent company produces poor rules that might favour one army above others; which might only have one viable build within armies and which might hyper focus on new stock over older models. These are the bad things for both competitive play AND the casual player.


2) The company end of marketing and material. This is a second part of the coin. If the company only promotes, only talks about and only features material for competitive games then that can again lead the market. Even though you can do whatever you want; its undeniable that the marketing and advertising and material the parent company makes; guides and influences the expectations and desires of the community at a large scale.

Sometimes there can be issues though - eg GW does put out a good many non-competitive focused elements and yet uptake is trickier it seems.


3) The local players. This is a big one - in fact nay I'd say its the make or break. You can have hyper competitive players who are welcoming to newbies. Who ease them into the game; teach them; guide them and help them learn.

You can also have seal clubbers and cliques (and many won't realise they are doing it) who will drive newbies away.

You can also have people who just don't know how to tone down their game or welcome new poeple or teach them how to play.


4) Group size. In general the larger the group the greater the potential spread of skill levels and skills within the group. Therefore bigger groups have a potential to be more welcoming to a broader range of players. Smaller groups (and sadly a LOT of wargame groups are smaller) are often much more polarized. Especially as you get older and its often the most keen who are left playing - who even if they aren't high skill they've been playing for years and have cobbled together some skill and tricks.




My personal view is that competitive play is a good thing for a firm to focus on in terms of producing a balanced good solid gameplay system. Build the core game for the competitive scene with those positive aspects I outlined above.

From there you've a solid set of rules that can be adapted - be it for competitive games or narrative ones. It's a lot easier to do fun stuff like sieges or last-chance stands or campaigns when you've solid rules where you can trust them to work a certain way - thus also work a certain way if you tweak them or mess things up.

Play wise a lot of this can be improved by the parent company devoting resorces and marketing toward community building elements. Eg look at GW pushing games like Killteam as their own game and format. KT has been around for ages, but it was a tack-on in the rules - making it its own product line and focus means that its now a format people play purely for its own thing; not just as the intro game whilst you were building up.

Thanks for giving your view !

I do agree player behaviour as persons is a big factor at a local level, especially for first experiences. If you play someone who's not friendly and / or behave badly, it will always have a bad impact on your own enjoyment, no matter what the game is.

But the topic I'd like to talk about isn't really about that - the players at my club are friendly and always happy to help, but in their own specific way to play the game - which is competitive play. I do believe the way you play and see games play a big role as well outside of your own behaviour as people - and how it is presented by the game company / online competitive community has an influence on that, I think.

That's why I'm more focusing on your 1st point here, if you don't mind. This point in particular :

Tight rules that are well written with flat balance so that any well build army can face off well against another is a good thing for competitive, casual, custom or whatever kind of play the players want.

Actually, tightly written rules are really boring to read. If you want to make it as clear as possible, and try to remove all uncertainty or personnal interpretation while covering all the cases it could occurr in game...it tends to be repetitive and bland at best, repelling at worse.

I think that's not a good thing in itself for the appeal of a game in general, because if it's not appealing to read, people will just not bother. Why wanting to invest in a game that looks like it's boring just by seeing how the rules are written ? It's especially true if the game is quite complex (like multiple tables to hit, wound, and so on) and has a lot of pages just for basic rules.

I admit, I have quite a lot of years sunk in way too many games. I have read a lot of game systems, from the first GW games with background text bits mixed with rules in different sections to the tight rules with sub-sub-sections to sub-sections that look as fun to read as law articles. Complexity of the game is a crucial part here : the more rules you have, the more difficult it is to cover all cases happening in game and the more pages you need to write if you really want to be tight.

From a new player's perspective, it's the first obstacle to get over : get the rules enough to play. And the fun can already be assessed there - there ARE rule systems that are written to be fun to read...but competitive tight sets are definitely not part of them. If the new player doesn't have fun in reading the rules already, he may simply give up at this step.

I'm not that sure it's such a good thing in itself for the building of a gaming community. It is certainly good for a very specific competitive scene, but such rules aren't needed to be written that way for casual or narrative play at all. On the opposite, they tend to be in the way of such plays.

The BAD kind of competitive play focus is where the parent company produces poor rules that might favour one army above others; which might only have one viable build within armies and which might hyper focus on new stock over older models. These are the bad things for both competitive play AND the casual player.

That point, I tend to disagree mainly because it only applies if you think the competitive player and the casual / narrative player give the same importance to rules in comparison to their own game objectives. I already find myself not in that case, especially when I play narrative focused games like Rangers of Shadow Deep where players play more against the game rather than against each other, in which case having an overpowered / underpowered side may be actually the point : rules in such games are more a guidance to lead to an interesting story rather the immovable truth all players must agree to make their game work. In a narrative game, if rules get in the way of the fun / story, players can just agree to ignore it - because it leads to a much better outcome for all parties involved. And if a specific rule is not clear or not tightly written, the players interpret the best way according to the game they're playing or simply roll a die to decide. It doesn't need to be tightly written or perfectly balanced in all situations.

If the company only promotes, only talks about and only features material for competitive games then that can again lead the market. Even though you can do whatever you want; its undeniable that the marketing and advertising and material the parent company makes; guides and influences the expectations and desires of the community at a large scale.

Very obviously, but I wonder if, in reality, having that big of a focus on a specific way to play is not more closing the market to more opportunities of sales rather than anything else.

This seems to be the question of the moment. I think we've hit a new era of gaming, whether we're talking tabletop or eSports, where a lot of the ideals of the 2010's are finding their long term consequences. It's an era in which the power to distribute changes became trivial enough that it felt likes games could be perfected and that gaming could be the same kind of event as traditional sports. We've seen a pretty sharp downturn in that trend leading up to the pandemic, which kind of reset the field going forward.

I think we've mostly learned that competitive ideals are good, they just come at a cost you have to account for. Balance patches are good, even great for a game, but they don't "fix" it. There's actually a great discussion going on right now in the Fighting Game Community due to the way the latest Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat have been patched. I could write several paragraphs on this alone (and might later) but its well worth looking into.

Ultimately what it comes down to is that patching is no replacement for getting it right the first time. Nerfs can be necessary but also take something someone loves out of the game. Changing points fundamentally breaks small collections. Making the game more fair has to keep what makes the game fun to begin with.

I think similarly, companies have learned that they don't really need to support competitive play. If the game is good, competitive people will run tournaments just fine on their own. The big modern lesson seems to be that scenarios need to be built into the core gameplay and not a tournament add on. If its fun for "standard" games it should be fun in a tournament. By the same token, its important to recognize that some things the competitive crowd gets upset is out of their control is part of the fun. When people love your game, be very careful when removing any aspect of it.

As for the players themselves? I think you're often left making the best of what you have to work with. It's absolutely vital that a game remain welcoming to new players, the challenge is making approachable games fun for veterans. It's a challenge big games have yet to truly solve while a lot of modern games get around it by simply not being much bigger than a demo to begin with.

I guess where I'm going with all of this is that overall, competitive players are a sign of a game worth playing more than something that needs to be catered to. The important thing is to ensure the game remains worth playing and not to lose sight of what attracted people to the game in the first place.

Sarouan wrote:

That point, I tend to disagree mainly because it only applies if you think the competitive player and the casual / narrative player give the same importance to rules in comparison to their own game objectives. I already find myself not in that case, especially when I play narrative focused games like Rangers of Shadow Deep where players play more against the game rather than against each other, in which case having an overpowered / underpowered side may be actually the point : rules in such games are more a guidance to lead to an interesting story rather the immovable truth all players must agree to make their game work. In a narrative game, if rules get in the way of the fun / story, players can just agree to ignore it - because it leads to a much better outcome for all parties involved. And if a specific rule is not clear or not tightly written, the players interpret the best way according to the game they're playing or simply roll a die to decide. It doesn't need to be tightly written or perfectly balanced in all situations.

Here's the thing though. If you have a really well balanced rules system so that two decently designed armies with equal points are evenly matched then you can build a narrative game where one side has 50% more in points/units than the other and have a good idea how it will impact the gameplay. In fact you can more easily predict how the game will go and thus how much you can add before it might become woefully unfun/fair. With a tightly designed system you can play with it and mess around much much more easily. Even the parent firm can mess around with it a lot more and creative narrative events and such.

If one faction is just outright better then it hurts casual and competitive play because whoever plays that faction has an unfair advantage outside of their own skill. Casual that's bad, competitive its bad. Especially in wargames because wargamers aren't going to change armies on the fly - even competitive people don't like it as much and will often use secondhand to make rapid army swaps (so it doesn't benefit the parent company that much in all truth).

For me its like establishing the foundations of a building. If the foundations are lopsided and poor then no matter what you build on top - be it a house or a castle - is going to inherit those weaknesses and magnify them. However if the foundations are level, solid, well build then you can build whatever you want ontop and it will be sound and stand tall and firm and last.





The other thing you seem to touch on is wording. My view on that is that has nothing to do with the rules and everything to do with what surrounds them.
GW goes nuts trying to make each unit "flavourful" by giving them loads of different named abilities and traits- even if the vast majority are the same thing (eg +1 save etc...). This makes the game sound fluffy and fun at a glance till you have to learn it then you find you're always dipping back to hte books over and over for those little changes.
In my view a narrative/casual gamer wants rules that are easy to learn - even more so than competitive players. Rules that are clearly written; use simple unified terminology; have similar structures and which are balanced. Heck just having good balance is a huge thing for casual players because it frees them up to build more varied armies without being penalised. Unbalanced means that there's always an ideal single approach and if you're not buliding that you might be woefully underpowered compared to your opponent.

What you can do to make the game more fun is build more lore and story around the units. A page with stats is good, but in the end its always going to be about the numbers. You can so easily build stories, lore, adventures, narrative elements as part of a book (Eg codex style) around the army. That's the engaging hook for the narrative and casual player. Those are separate from the stats, but they engage on the level of visual and imagination.
Trying to mix the two can work here and there and I'm all for named abilities; but have too many and you simply bog the player down with endless terminology that's different for each unit. It then becomes hard to focus on the flavour of the model when you're always having to look it up only to find that "Drazzors Uber Spear Thrusting Charge" is "oh its just a +1 on charge attacks". Suddenly its less uber and amazing and just a chore.

But you can write a short few paragraphs on Drazzor's amazing prowess in battle; about a massive charge led by them etc...

Simple answer - go ask Privateer Press. They started focusing almost exclusively on competitive play for warmachine, and the company and game started tanking when prior to that they were the big up and comer on the scene and continued to decline until recently when they rewrote the rules to lower the skill curve and make the game play a bit more casually and started promoting more narrative and non-competitive content.

Everything you described is basically what the warmachine community has been like since around 2016 I would say. The competitive players gatekept all the newcomers coming in ("hey, you want a game? 25 points!? no sorry I only play 75 point steamroller, maybe another time") or seal-clubbed ("oh man, you made a mistake, thats caster kill on turn 2 - better luck next time - play like you got a pair!") all the new and casual players out of the community, and their style of play was not conducive towards recruiting new blood in (would you want to get into a game when your minimum buy in to play the game at all is going to be $350-500, and when you do play the game your opponents are so much more skilled than you that the majority of your games end before you've really even started playing?). Until about a year ago, the majority of the people playing Warmachine today were the same people playing it in 2016 - there are a lot of people that stopped playing in that timeframe, but not a lot of people who started playing. And that mostly came down to the competitive bent in the community.

I largely agree with Overread.

Focussing on competitive play is a good way to gather feedback. Actual, verifiable feedback. Not random letters written in which read akin to…

“Dear GW.

Rock is OP. Paper fine. Love and Hugs, Scissors”.

For those like myself with a love for the narrative? A tighter rules set doesn’t change that. At all.

I can still create deliberate unbalanced scenarios, because the narrative can sometimes demand a force faces an unwinnable situation, where the name of the game is “take as many of those bar steward with you as you can”. Just as a final mega battle should have the potential to become a truly Pyrrhic victory.

The rules being tweaked and FAQ’s and Erratad regularly helps everyone. Especially if it removes weird Tournament Pack additions which folk might insist on, regardless of whether their opponent has seen them before, let alone might render their army selection illegal.

From OP’s post, it seems the problem here is a group of new players perhaps being overly insistent that all games be played to their standard.

That’s not a flaw of the rules. That a failure in communication. Importantly, neither side is Objectively In The Right. Just like….talk to each other, my dude. Even if it’s “one game with your extra rules, one game without”.

There is a detente waiting to be arrived at.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Simple answer - go ask Privateer Press. They started focusing almost exclusively on competitive play for warmachine, and the company and game started tanking when prior to that they were the big up and comer on the scene and continued to decline until recently when they rewrote the rules to lower the skill curve and make the game play a bit more casually and started promoting more narrative and non-competitive content.

My impression is that PP actually become 2nd to only GW on MK1-2 based on having a very tight very well written competitive rules set.

The reason they fell from MK2 to 3 was a series of mistakes/blunders/poor choices/situational issues that all happened within a really short time frame coupled to GW actually turning around and starting to do at least some more strict/competitive rules writing. If anything one of the issues with MK3 was that it stopped being quite as well written as MK2 was near the end (I seem to recall Skorne was entirely and utterly broken and had to be rebuilt).

So if anything its actually reinforcing that having tight, well written rules and good balance is a boon.

Losing that for a time along with everything else caused PP to reduce in population.




I do agree though that toxic/hyper competitive local players can be a huge barrier and a problem. But again this comes down two aspects
1) People not the game
2) Marketing the game/game modes.

Heck one of the chats for MKIV and the concern there was that the formats for the game (not the balance nor rules but the game formats) were built for the pro scene only and didn't introduce enough entry level systems for newbies. This also compounded by them only selling big boxed sets for armies instead of smaller starter forces. Both things that PP appears to now be doing a turn around on.
The actual rules haven't changed - the scenarios and the packaging and marketing are.

Again having that good foundation of strong rules, good writing, tight balance - all those things didn't create the problem. It was how they were presented and how they were advertised and encouraged to be used that was part of the issue .


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I largely agree with Overread.

Focussing on competitive play is a good way to gather feedback. Actual, verifiable feedback. Not random letters written in which read akin to…

“Dear GW.

Rock is OP. Paper fine. Love and Hugs, Scissors”.

This is also a very good point that I think deserves highlighting. Competitive games are the game working as it should; at its best by players who know what they are doing. It's also data that can be evaluated and reviewed because its published. Heck today larger events even record and stream games so you can not only record the win/loss and army compositions easily (online); but you can also watch the matches. You can see if one army really is just working better of if its happenstance that its just being played by more skilled players.


Narrative games are nearly pointless to gather balance data on because you can't standardise it when each group (and each game for each group) might use its own house rules. Though gathering that data can be a big help in designing your own narrative game addons/demo games and other elements in presenting the game. But you can't build balance around data that you can't review; nor where the player skill division could be vastly greater than at a competitive event.

Chaos nailed it. I will only add the following controversial takes. I look forward to being flamed and people telling me what an idiot I am. I would also add Guild Ball, and X-wing to the mix.

In my experience, focusing on competitive play creates a dead end in the design space. The game has no place else to go and dies. You see, competitive players basically want the reduction of chance and variability in the game, It has to be predictable. If X happens, then Y will result every time. Therefore, A is superior to B, so only do A. This is a hard limit to what the game can and will do. A more open approach allows for a larger game.

Secondly, your game needs to be able to appeal to a wide audience. Competitive players are only a portion of the play base. Once you cater to them exclusively you exclude others. It only takes 1 competitive player to insist on only playing competitive to make that the default play style in a club. This then excludes the other play styles. Those clubs eventually wither.

That depends entirely on how far you take it.

Using Tournament stats and verified observations can let you see when something is On The Wonk.

It could be as severe as an entire army being drastically overpowered, or as fixable as “that rule doesn’t actually do what we intended, so we’ve altered the wording accordingly”.

So there is a thing as going too far. Where that line is, I will of course not be so arrogant as to draw it myself

As a counter-example, let's look at Blood Bowl. The game is simple to play, and can be done competitively. However, it is not balanced at all.

It is full of random stuff if you want. Yet, it managed to live for years on its own without any support for a number of years.

There is no doubt it is successful, has competitive elements, but does not build or design specifically for that aspect of play.

Blood Bowl’s key is not Having That Many Rules.

Sure you can get Star Player Skills, but everyone otherwise largely follows the same rules. And, like WHFB? The true key to victory is your movement, and the proper planning thereof.

Or so I’m told. I’m utterly hopeless at it. Just a game I can’t get my head around. I’m one to pile in and try to cause as much mindless carnage as possible.

But, it’s lack of balance in certain teams (Halflings, Gobbos, and once upon a time Snotlings) is seen as a sign of pedigree, even if it’s “ha ha! You only got two touchdowns to my none, and my team is crap). And that only works because everyone Plays By The Same Rules.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Blood Bowl’s key is not Having That Many Rules.

Sure you can get Star Player Skills, but everyone otherwise largely follows the same rules. And, like WHFB? The true key to victory is your movement, and the proper planning thereof.

Or so I’m told. I’m utterly hopeless at it. Just a game I can’t get my head around. I’m one to pile in and try to cause as much mindless carnage as possible.

But, it’s lack of balance in certain teams (Halflings, Gobbos, and once upon a time Snotlings) is seen as a sign of pedigree, even if it’s “ha ha! You only got two touchdowns to my none, and my team is crap). And that only works because everyone Plays By The Same Rules.

Isn't that how most game work? Everyone has the same base rules with a few add-ons.

Movement, Melee, Morale, and Missile generally work the same for a game no matter who is doing it.

Blood Bowl is a relatively cheap game in which is trivial to change teams, both AoS and specially 40k are massive games in which you need hundreds if not thousands of dollars to build an army.

Maybe competitive play is a trap, but balance? balance is just as important if not even more to narrative and casual play.

Guild Ball is another game that tanked at the height of quality as a competitive ruleset because it became impossible to get into.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Guild Ball is another game that tanked at the height of quality as a competitive ruleset because it became impossible to get into.

This had more to do with production than anything though. When Steamforge swapped over to PVC and stopped producing pewter the game became impossible to get models for. Of the game's brief 5 year stint, there were nearly 2-3 years where getting models was incredibly difficult.

I will say that the game also suffered from too many patches and a tendency to take fun things away from players in the pursuit of perfect balance. Some of this way a result of some really binary mechanics (Midas, looking at you) and the overal narrow scope of gameplay, but I also think SFG were very much caught up in their own delusions of how easy it should be to perfectly balance a game.

The problem is that GW has "three modes of play" but only put the effort in to support two of them; matched and narrative. "We've been running a campaign" or "my list has the following" are pretty much the only things you hear about these days and it gets tiresome.

Open play is at best mentioned once in the core books but you don't hear about it again. Open play is not just "do your own thing" for players, but a sandbox of experimentation for GW's designers themselves; ideas that aren't suitable for matched play or narrative, but they know some players will still get a kick out of them.

It would help if GW - once an edition - released an Open Play supplement full of fun and goofy ideas; Solo-coop dungeon crawling. Sky battles. Last man standing. Power points for fast'n'lazy games. Custom heroes. Kitbashing. How many guardsmen it takes to bring down a Norn Assimilator. Jousting games for Knights on horse back. Something that reinforces that Open Play is a thing and its absolutely okay to be a filthy casual.

 Tyran wrote:
Blood Bowl is a relatively cheap game in which is trivial to change teams, both AoS and specially 40k are massive games in which you need hundreds if not thousands of dollars to build an army.

I think investment in terms of both time and money is important to consider.

Take a look at card games - they have insane imbalance. A really top end deck and an intermediate deck can be so widely apart that the intermediate will basically only win either if the owner of the advanced deck has no clue how to play the deck; or if the shuffling messes them up. Now whilst you can spend a lot of money on MTG decks; swapping cards out takes seconds.

Bloodbowl is a model game, but as noted most teams are pretty cheap to buy into and collect and you could easily run several. So imbalance can be "slighty" less of an issue because you can chop and change around.

Wargames however are very different. Even ignoring the model cost; the time involved in building and painting an army is considerable. Most people buy into one or a few armies and that's it and even if they have several the time investment for a game is also considerable. They might get 1 game week at best whilst for a card game you can run a whole small tournament in the same amount of time - ergo LOTS of games.

So people want their army to work. Now some will argue that imbalance is good, but that is typically only when the army they have is the overpowered one. Otherwise most will argue for better balance (for their force) because they aren't just going to swap on a whim. They are "stuck" with that army. Look at how people drifted back when armies like Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar went whole editions without updated rules. Forget being competitive, those armies were flat out ignored for whole editions. It didn't make those players more keen to use different armies; it made many want to move to a whole different game.

Cause in the end when you are buying a new army the additional cost to buy into a new wargame is trivial (often 1 additional rulebook and that's it - and with many other wragames not having army books it can be just the same cost as buying a codex)

Also there is something kinda horrible in being told you are meant to be underpowered.

40k would literally die overnight if Games Workshop outright stated as design goal that Marines are meant to lose games because "Grimdark".

My first response is: hell no.

A tightly-written, balanced, complete rule set is a death sentence for a game.

No matter how perfect the rules are, there will eventually be “preferred builds” that push out all the diversity and flavor from army lists and make games feel like a forgone conclusion even if they are not. And once people have their preferred builds, they won’t need to buy more minis unless you “ruin everything” with new rules or competitive new units. And the community will be absolutely toxic for new players or anyone playing any other kind of game than TFG tournament play.

Of the games I have supported, the serious players have been the first to turn on them and start pushing newbies away. Players who are invested in the lore, minis or narrative play tend to stay and welcome more people. Hardcore gamers are not fun and they make the games unfun; they have no chill and do not stay around to fix broken games but only to demonstrate their skill mastery by telling how terrible the thing you enjoy is.


It’s counterintuitive but a tight, tournament-ready rule set written to be “good for everybody” is actually tedious and dull for everyone but the tournament-ready players.

Some great discussion here so far!

As a game designer (12 years designing Magic: the Gathering sets for Wizards of the Coast) I've thought a lot about this topic, and seen a lot of games come and go. I'll relate some of my thoughts to Magic and other trading card games, since that's my area of expertise, but I think that most of these thoughts are equally applicable to other lifestyle hobby games like Warhammer.

First, to answer the topic question succinctly: Is focusing on the competitive scene really good for the survivability of a game? No! Too much focus on competitive play will kill a game.

A big question to ask is, "how skill-testing is your game?". In chess, the stronger player wins basically 100% of the time. In War, the stronger player (if such a thing can even be said to exist) wins basically 50% of the time. The very strongest Magic players have a win-rate of about 70%. This is much lower than chess's 100%, but it's enough that the strongest players tend to do well in tournaments over the course of several rounds. Meanwhile, something very important is also happening: beginning players win a game now and then. It cannot be overstated: nobody likes to lose over and over, and never win. It isn't fun, and players will quit a game if they lose consistently. I've seen more trading card games than I can count whose designers were sure would beat Magic because they'd eliminated so much of the pesky variance that reduces strong players' win percentages, only to discover that, without a constant influx of new players, any lifestyle game will wither than die.

Accessibility is also an important factor, and its an even more serious consideration for a miniatures game that involves painting your own figures than it is for a card game where you just have to buy the cards and put them together in a deck. If you need to buy $500 worth of minis and spend months painting an army before you can play a 2,000 points Warhammer game, it's going to be hard to recruit new players. GW's Combat Patrol format is a good step, and Kill Team is even better. Magic has similar formats like Sealed and Draft where you just have to open a few booster packs to get the cards you need for some games.

As far as rules tightness goes, it's hard to say for sure. Magic's rules are very tight, and the Comprehensive Rulebook is hundreds of pages long, but as a practical matter, less than a dozen people in the world really need to read and memorize those rules. I've been designing cards professionally for over a decade, as I said above, and I certainly haven't read the rulebook from cover to cover. We've made rules reference sheets that are a couple pages long, though I've seen little evidence that anybody even uses them to learn the game; most people learn from a friend or from a video game adaptation. I don't really see how it's practical to write such tight rules for Warhammer and similar games, as the interactions are often pretty ambiguous, but I don't think that a tight ruleset is necessarily a problem as long as people can get to the fun part without having to wade through reading it all first.

Doesn't matter if the focus is on competitive play if the company behind it all doesn't know how to use the incoming data and writes knee-jerk reactions based on high-level win-rates and a few very loud personalities in the tournament sphere.

Yeah, in general, too many balance tweaks for these kind of games can be harmful. Players are generally willing to tolerate a certain amount of imbalance, and every time you nerf a unit (or ban a card, in Magic's case) it has the potential to cause a player to quit. I think it's generally best to wait until play numbers actually start dropping before taking action.

 Pariah Press wrote:
Yeah, in general, too many balance tweaks for these kind of games can be harmful. Players are generally willing to tolerate a certain amount of imbalance, and every time you nerf a unit (or ban a card, in Magic's case) it has the potential to cause a player to quit. I think it's generally best to wait until play numbers actually start dropping before taking action.

I do agree that for physical based games, too many balancing tweaks can make the paperwork side of the game too iffy or messy to keep up with and log - even if you use a digital app on the side to help.

That said in theory if you've started out with a strong focus for balance then the number of tweaks and adjustments that come after should start to diminish to a more sedate pace that's more practical.

GW had issues with this because of how they publish rules in different expansion books and how they also re-write the rules every 3 years so things are JUST starting to settle and then its all up in the air again. It's a huge problem with their approach because it means they can never reach a settled spot where most of the rules are in 1 book for the army and that book is being updated more gradually.

It's a tricky balancing act. They want things to change enough that the competitive players want to keep buying more models, but not so much that peoples' armies are completely invalidated and they get frustrated and quit.

Thanks for the comments, and especially to Pariah Press to give his own work experience ! That's insightful.

I totally agree that having feedback as a game designer is easier when you compile data from the competitive scene : because that's where the organized play is...organized !

But to me, it's a tricky double edged sword because it's data that comes from the competitive scene only. So all the feedback is necessarily from the competitive play's point of view...which has quite an obvious dead angle and can only reinforce all the bias you can have as a competitive play fan if you have this as a game designer, IMHO.

It's pretty clear competitive scene alone isn't enough to sustain sales / game popularity in clubs, yet at least on the internet, the voices of their fans are loud. I wonder if it's not a case of the snake eating its own tail in the end ?


The matter of balance comes back regularly, indeed. I do understand people in a competitive game would like to have as much as a "fair game" with both sides having equal chances to win, and it is also why a rule system with as few interpretations as possible is good for the competitive play, since the ultimate purpose of it is, in the end, a competition.

But that's also why I'm not convinced when I read it's always good for all ways to play to have rules treated and written from the competitive play's perspective (meaning balanced and tightly written rules), that's it's automatically a good base for all games. Because it's all a question of player's game goals, in the end.

If a player looks for fun, for telling a story or even just want to enjoy putting as many as their miniatures on the table, competition isn't his main goal. Should he thus be bothered by trivial matters like "balance" or "boringly written rules" as he tries to get into the game ? If as Pariah Press say, a lot of players actually learn from videos or a friend rather than reading through pages and pages of rules and different FAQs / game situations - and actually take the rules when they're needed depending of the situation rather than consulting them all the time, do they really need to be crucially tightly written / balanced from the start ? Can't they just be interpreted on the spot by talking with your game partner rather than seeing him as your opponent ?

I remember Jervis Johnson talking about the "social contract between gamers" when talking about his game design. And it really struck me when I saw people deriding his vision on forums (mostly coming from the competitive scene, oddly enough): it's in the end a question of game ideology and how you see the people you play with. If they're your opponents you compete with, it's logical to want to have a neutral base for rules and perfectly equal chances for both sides at all times. But if they're your partners to have fun together and the goal is something else than just competition...all of these things are actually secondary, and people would rather zap that boring part to get into the fun, trusting their friends and videos they watched to know how to play.

I know, wargames are about conflicts first. But why both sides should be automatically balanced for that to be a good thing ? If wargames are a picture of how wars happen in our history (or how they would happen in a fantasy world)...well, history and our own game's universes are full of battles that aren't balanced at all. In fact, some of the greatest battles come from desperate situations where the underdog manages to handle the situation to turn the tide against all odds. Obviously, it's never enjoyable to lose all the time when your goal is just competition, but if a special scenario involves the retelling of a battle where one side is twice as numerous / in power than the other, and the game objective is to fight as long as you can because of the story / in the cadre of a campaign where the next battle will start differently depending on which turn the underdog finally breaks...that's a completely different outcome, in which having balanced sides gets in the way of the game.

Making the distinction between Blood Bowl and wargames to justify Blood Bowl purposely having underpowered / overpowered teams on design is, to me, a question of game ideology to defend the point of view of "balance being good for all games". Because a game of Blood Bowl is about competition, in the end : you have 2 teams competing for victory on the other at the end of a match - it's the same than a war between 2 armies, just in fantasy football. But the difference with Blood Bowl is that it aknowledges not all teams are equals in their chances of "winning", that's why some are cheating and the whole game design is about having fun with that ! Why wouldn't that be possible with wargames, in the end, if not a question of game ideology / game design ?

When I read Overread's statement about that, I wonder to myself : why rules couldn't work if it's the other way around, meaning they're written from another play's perspective first ? That's what Warhammer Battle did in the beginning and for quite a lot of years after...and even if surely the competitive scene did moan a lot about that situation, it still worked for that long in the end - so maybe the "solid foundations" needed for a game to last don't actually rely on the competitive play's principles ? In fact, one could argue that Battle died when it focused too much on the competitive scene's aspect of the game and it simply became boring for the rest of players to bother playing it.


On that matter, I'd like to have a thought on the importance of randomness in a game. It's usually represented by dice, but cards can also be another way. To me, randomness is the agent of both perfect neutrality and unfairness. Neutrality because when randomness strikes, it's never a question of emotion or interpretation : you roll the dice, and whatever the result is, it just happens. Unfairness because when a bad result happens and "costs you the game", it's always the easy target of your wrath and sense of injustice as a player. To me, that's the reason they're still the most used tools in game design, and why they're irreplaceable in a game. Yet, they're often the target of the competitive scene, especially the skilled players...because randomness is the enemy of skill. It allows the new players to win with just a stroke of luck against a veteran. It derails a balanced game just because of rolls happening out of "normal stats" and tip the favor in one side. I have indeed seen some "fan game systems" trying to minimize as much as possible the influence of randomness into their mechanisms, so that the skill is mostly favored...and the fact few of us gamers have heard of them is telling me a story about the popularity / interest of such designs as games.

It might just be me, but I think that if you want to bring in plenty of new people, skill (either in listbuilding or play) shouldn't be a very decisive factor. After all, no one wants to play a game where they have to spend a ton of money just to get beaten time and time again. Miniature wargames have the disadvantage that they cost a fair bit of money and a lot of time to get things ready for a game, so you don't want to go through all that effort just to lose. That goes against some of the more competitive ethos.

As a player, I like having a game with reasonable balance. It doesn't have to be perfect or the like, but I like to avoid situations where one side can just walk all over the other unless it's in a specific scenario. Often, you should be able to judge how fair a battle is but that doesn't really work in the GW points-based system where people put far too much faith into points systems.

 Dolnikan wrote:

As a player, I like having a game with reasonable balance. It doesn't have to be perfect or the like, but I like to avoid situations where one side can just walk all over the other unless it's in a specific scenario. Often, you should be able to judge how fair a battle is but that doesn't really work in the GW points-based system where people put far too much faith into points systems.

Ah, you put the finger on something very sensitive : the point building system. I totally get wanting a game with reasonnable balance. The hard question is to define what is "reasonnable".

GW sure is the easy example here, but other games offer some different perspectives. For example, in Saga, there's somewhat of a point system but since all units actually follow the same archetypes, it is very basic : 4 to 8 to choose from, 1 allowing you to buy a unit of a different number of miniatures depending of the archetype. And your warlord is free. There's no real need to go further in details because the way the game handles the lists is already simple in itself.

In 40k, I remember the hot debate about Power Levels vs points system, the first considered "not detailed enough" and thus "more imbalanced. Having used it in the past, I can say that while yes there were some differences if you use the same army building it with Power Level then with points, the impact on the game itself was not necessarily that important to "unbalance" it further. To be honest, I believe the main reason it was left in the end is more a question of habits from veterans who always played with points and didn't see a real reason to change - and the new players taught from them just following what their mentors told them to do. The fact points were overwhelmy used in tournaments from which feedback is gathered by GW certainly didn't help either.

In the end, was the Power Level system "reasonnable enough" for balance or was it more victim of a smear campaign from the competitive players obsessed with points ? Who knows. But it's all a matter of player perception, in the end...and how they are presented the system for a "fair balance".


There's also the question of how often you update that system so that it's the most "fairly balanced", depending again on feedback from players. Was really what they did in 10th edition so shortly after its launch that necessary ? For the competitive scene, it's a firm "yes" from what I read so far. But from casual players, it's more mixed. Having to deal with FAQ / erratas / point update sheet online that early is part of the reasons some didn't want to deal with the game anymore, I have heard.

In comparison, there's no need to update the system in Saga.

Privateer press made a lot of mistakes with regard to wmh in the transition from mk2 to mk3. Mistakes like killing the pressgangers programme, killing no quarter, screwing their distributors, mucking up mk3s release (Skorne had to be completely rewritten out of the gate). Please note the game was declining in late mk2 anyway.

When the dust settled, they resulted in largely was the game retrenched around a hyper competitive rump community.

By this point the game had expanded massively and the time/effort/burden of knowledge to 'git gud' and get to a decent level was too much for too many people, whether returning vets like me or new players (learning mk3 from a mk2 vets position was a significsnt burden of knowledge and ultimately for me, not worth it, it was absolutely an obnoxious one for a player totally new to it) .

All that was left were the super serious players who only played 75pt steamroller as everyone else checked out. Pp had to cater to them to keep the lights on. Catering to them meant catering to a game/community thst was often hostile to new and casual playstyles whixh meant chucking the casual players under the bus. Vicious circle ensues.

Once the casual community left, the main game withered further without new/casual players and simply could not grow- even if the rules were good, this was the fundamental truth of the situation.


Truth is the competitive community in terms of numbers is dwarfed by casual players. Competitive players and the conpetitive game needs the casual game and casual player base to suppott it.

Every competitive player was once a casual or at least of casual/lower skill.


One thing that strikes me is we keep saying if the parent company "focuses on the competitive game" or "the casual player" but I think where we are stumbling is we keep boiling points down to those buzzwords.

As a result I think many of us sound like we are disagreeing on the overall point when we are in fact agreeing on the minor points that lead up to it.




Eg several of us argue that focus on competitive play for construction of the core rules and game balancing is a good thing. Whilst others are noting that hyper focusing the structure of the game and the marketing and such on the competitive game is a bad thing.

Ergo that no company should focus all resources and all attention upon either one or the other. Hyper on either one is unhealthy and the healthy balance is a measure of both in the right places.