Question about GW's content writing structure

[swarmofseals]

It may be a long shot for anyone to be able to answer this, but I'm wondering about how GW produces its battletomes. I just saw a recent short clip posted with some interviews of the Legions of Nagash Design Team talking about how they created the rules in the tome in an attempt to give the mortarchs/legions unique character that is reflected in both the fluff and the rules.

That got me thinking about organizational structure. Not sure if you all are familiar with the way Wizards of the Coast does things, but they have a two (now three, actually) tiered approach to creating new sets. To be clear, I'm talking about the functional gameplay of new sets, not the creative/artistic/worldbuilding aspects.

First you have Design. The job of Design is, basically, to come up with ideas for what all the new cards in the set do. They collaborate with a different team, Development, whose job it is to take Design's, well, designs and hone them for usability and balance. So they tweak the numbers and might suggest some functional changes but they don't create new content (to my knowledge). Finally, there is a new third team called Play Design that basically operates as a dedicated tournament level playtesting team to give feedback to Design and Development about the new set from a competitive perspective.

Now, GW may not have the resources to do all of this but I am wondering if it wouldn't be really helpful for GW to have clearly delineated Design and Development people working on new content, with the former tasked with creating the new rules and making sure they fit with the flavor they are trying to capture in the new content while Development focuses on usability, competitiveness and tweaking the numbers around to make sure that everything is tight and balanced. These are very different tasks, and it seems really advantageous to have people who specialize in each one. 

[BURF1]

1 hour ago, swarmofseals said:

It may be a long shot for anyone to be able to answer this, but I'm wondering about how GW produces its battletomes. I just saw a recent short clip posted with some interviews of the Legions of Nagash Design Team talking about how they created the rules in the tome in an attempt to give the mortarchs/legions unique character that is reflected in both the fluff and the rules.

That got me thinking about organizational structure. Not sure if you all are familiar with the way Wizards of the Coast does things, but they have a two (now three, actually) tiered approach to creating new sets. To be clear, I'm talking about the functional gameplay of new sets, not the creative/artistic/worldbuilding aspects.

First you have Design. The job of Design is, basically, to come up with ideas for what all the new cards in the set do. They collaborate with a different team, Development, whose job it is to take Design's, well, designs and hone them for usability and balance. So they tweak the numbers and might suggest some functional changes but they don't create new content (to my knowledge). Finally, there is a new third team called Play Design that basically operates as a dedicated tournament level playtesting team to give feedback to Design and Development about the new set from a competitive perspective.

Now, GW may not have the resources to do all of this but I am wondering if it wouldn't be really helpful for GW to have clearly delineated Design and Development people working on new content, with the former tasked with creating the new rules and making sure they fit with the flavor they are trying to capture in the new content while Development focuses on usability, competitiveness and tweaking the numbers around to make sure that everything is tight and balanced. These are very different tasks, and it seems really advantageous to have people who specialize in each one. 

GW doesn't actually give a flying ferret about how the things function in game beyond 'wouldn't it be cool if?' and they never have. I can almost guarantee that they're more irritated than anything that they have to give so much more thought to things like 'consistent terminology' and 'balance' and 'functional units' than they used to.

GW has never and will never care about the 'numbers' part of the game very much and that's just something you get used to if you play competitively. They will never devote the amount of resources you described to 'gameplay' as they've always seen it as secondary to 'hobby'. They only started actually playtesting their books in the past 2 years.

[swarmofseals]

@BURF1 I am aware of GW's history. I'm also aware that GW has been trying to do things differently in the last few years. Let's not make assumptions about what GW's approach will be in the future.

EDIT: I also just want to add that until now I was totally unaware that GW were even doing rules design in teams. I had thought before that it was basically one guy writing each book. Team based work is a huge step forward.

[BURF1]

7 minutes ago, swarmofseals said:

@BURF1 I am aware of GW's history. I'm also aware that GW has been trying to do things differently in the last few years. Let's not make assumptions about what GW's approach will be in the future.

That's literally the whole point of this thread isn't it? Why even waste your time typing this then? 

[Mayple]

@BURF1 what is and is not a waste of ones personal time is entirely subjective, no? Let's not assume that @swarmofseals's inquiry is pointless, or unwished for, unless you have some intimate knowledge about current GW's internal structure and vision that you would like to share. Perhaps a quote stating anything along the lines of what you just said. If not, I really don't see why the questions asked should go unexplored.

Curiosity is never a waste of time

[Red]

I remember on one of the Warhammer TV things when they had a play tester on the stream announcing during their battle reports for 8th edition. He made some comment about how he had played over 185 games with death guard and over 387 games with space marines. He also said he was really terrible at the game.

That implies that there is a testing layer... but if he's not that good at the game, it might just be the "Development" level of QA mentioned in the OP that looks for functional issues [can the player finish the game with these rules?], not the "Play Design" level of design that applies analysis and critical thinking to the feature they are trying to test [is the game fair, or balanced?]

 

But maybe the team that writes the General's Handbook and Chapter Approved are separate from the above, and look at the game from a "Play Design" perspective.

[swarmofseals]

5 hours ago, BURF1 said:

That's literally the whole point of this thread isn't it? Why even waste your time typing this then? 

Two reasons. Firstly, I know there are GW folks and folks that are quite close to GW who read and at least occasionally post on this forum so it's not completely hopeless to think that an actual GW person will chime in. Secondly, I can't pretend to read even close to everything that GW writes. Wizards of the Coast is VERY open about their process and their designers/developers write a ton about it. It's entirely possible that some GW folks have written or spoken about their process in greater detail and I just haven't heard about it. Is it that unreasonable to think that someone on this forum might have come across these articles/interviews and be able to comment?

[Ollie Grimwood]

GW is open about their design process. Jes Goodwin talked through it on Warhammer TV.  It runs like this 

1. Concept sketches by folks such as Jes and John Blanche 

2. Models designed and sculpted 

3. Background developed 

4. Rules written to fit the models and background. 

GW games are built around the models the models aren’t built for the rules. 

[flemingmma]

I would like a gdc style talk on how gw comes up with everything.

[Killax]

10 hours ago, BURF1 said:

GW has never and will never care about the 'numbers' part of the game very much and that's just something you get used to if you play competitively. They will never devote the amount of resources you described to 'gameplay' as they've always seen it as secondary to 'hobby'. They only started actually playtesting their books in the past 2 years.

100% this in terms of design. It was in the worse days of 40K and WFB where GW marketing suddenly did start to mingle with certain designs and luckily GW employees can now be open about it. As they are under a new management that expects more designs but really leaves the designers to do their thing the best. The result of people doing their things the best is the current very healthy state of Games Workshop, AoS and 40K.  To the point where several Specialist Games have come back because their main line can carry this investment.

29 minutes ago, flemingmma said:

I would like a gdc style talk on how gw comes up with everything.

Sometimes they do this with Reddit AMA's, it's just that it's more likely to occur with former employees because GW has their reasons to keep their future plans for themselves. 

But what is cool is that sometimes GW has opened up to the player base to show how they do things. Like WotC it often starts out with the narrative and sketches fleshing out how something like that could look (tons of sketches). Then there is a progress where some sketches get picked, (don't know who actually does that) and the green light for digital sculpting is given. Which goes on and on. This procress has been around since the 2000's as far as I know.
One really cool thing is that I think at this point GW probably has digital sculpts for years to come allready, which in turn might get tweeked in time to time to even match the narrative better for a particular setting. 

What I'd also look forward to is if GW will do sculpted bases like they do for Shadespire for their 'far future' models. It's in principe a really cool concept I think that no other compagny uses yet.

 

[Gaz Taylor]

+++ Mod Hat On +++

@BURF1  We do not want to see the tone and behavior you have displayed in this thread on TGA. If you disagree with anything, be more constructive rather than sarcastic and put down.

+++ Mod Hat Off +++

11 hours ago, swarmofseals said:

Now, GW may not have the resources to do all of this but I am wondering if it wouldn't be really helpful for GW to have clearly delineated Design and Development people working on new content, with the former tasked with creating the new rules and making sure they fit with the flavor they are trying to capture in the new content while Development focuses on usability, competitiveness and tweaking the numbers around to make sure that everything is tight and balanced. These are very different tasks, and it seems really advantageous to have people who specialize in each one. 

They sort of do this now. If you don't believe me, just look at the quality of the recent Battletomes in comparison to the ones released last year  

I think the issue is that you are trying to compare Apples and Oranges when taking what GW do in comparison to Wizards. Whilst I'm no expert in Game Design, I'm sure it's a lot easier to test a card game and balance it in comparison to a table top miniature game. You also have to ask the question, do GW want to balance it to the level you would like it at or do you think they will balance it to a good standard and then tweak it with something like a annual update

[swarmofseals]

7 hours ago, Gaz Taylor said:

They sort of do this now. If you don't believe me, just look at the quality of the recent Battletomes in comparison to the ones released last year  

I think the issue is that you are trying to compare Apples and Oranges when taking what GW do in comparison to Wizards. Whilst I'm no expert in Game Design, I'm sure it's a lot easier to test a card game and balance it in comparison to a table top miniature game. You also have to ask the question, do GW want to balance it to the level you would like it at or do you think they will balance it to a good standard and then tweak it with something like a annual update

Yeah, the quality has increased for sure. I also think the quality shows in the FAQs. 

I'm not sure you are correct on the ease of balancing Magic vs. Warhammer though. They are certainly different problems to balance though. In Warhammer each piece has far more "moving parts" if you will and there is a level of complexity to the overall board that isn't (usually) present in Magic. However in Magic there are many more moving parts, more new content per release and more complex formats to test. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes Wizards misses degenerate interactions even in the narrowest of formats and they've had a really bad run over the past couple of years as far as balance goes (despite putting a ton of resources into the problem and having tremendous institutional expertise). 

Personally I think balance is in as good of a place now as it's ever been (at least in my memory). We'll have to see what comes out of this most recent FAQ as well as the impact of Nurgle and Death, of course. But I'm cautiously optimistic. Even before we saw a tournament metagame with a pretty good amount of diversity despite Tzeentch. Things could be improved of course, but that will probably always be the case!

 

[flemingmma]

1 hour ago, swarmofseals said:

Yeah, the quality has increased for sure. I also think the quality shows in the FAQs. 

I'm not sure you are correct on the ease of balancing Magic vs. Warhammer though. They are certainly different problems to balance though. In Warhammer each piece has far more "moving parts" if you will and there is a level of complexity to the overall board that isn't (usually) present in Magic. However in Magic there are many more moving parts, more new content per release and more complex formats to test. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes Wizards misses degenerate interactions even in the narrowest of formats and they've had a really bad run over the past couple of years as far as balance goes (despite putting a ton of resources into the problem and having tremendous institutional expertise). 

Personally I think balance is in as good of a place now as it's ever been (at least in my memory). We'll have to see what comes out of this most recent FAQ as well as the impact of Nurgle and Death, of course. But I'm cautiously optimistic. Even before we saw a tournament metagame with a pretty good amount of diversity despite Tzeentch. Things could be improved of course, but that will probably always be the case!

 

Lest we forget the looter scooter debacle.

[Killax]

20 hours ago, Gaz Taylor said:

I'm sure it's a lot easier to test a card game and balance it in comparison to a table top miniature game. You also have to ask the question, do GW want to balance it to the level you would like it at or do you think they will balance it to a good standard and then tweak it with something like a annual update

 

12 hours ago, swarmofseals said:

I'm not sure you are correct on the ease of balancing Magic vs. Warhammer though. They are certainly different problems to balance though. In Warhammer each piece has far more "moving parts" if you will and there is a level of complexity to the overall board that isn't (usually) present in Magic. However in Magic there are many more moving parts, more new content per release and more complex formats to test. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes Wizards misses degenerate interactions even in the narrowest of formats and they've had a really bad run over the past couple of years as far as balance goes (despite putting a ton of resources into the problem and having tremendous institutional expertise). 

From my perspective with a history in MtG and playing AoS now, the comparison is really hard to make. But I'll try to explain why:

For MtG there are a lot of additional products but they thrive on the format idea of Standard, Modern and Legacy. These formats are what keep the cards expensive, what keep players going to event and basically are core sells for Wizards to keep in check. As we speak Wizards has made some really big leaps (which usually indicate business not doing that well) but what is really a part of the issue for them is that they are more of less in a GW WFB state, their game is really old, people want new stuff but not too much stuff out of the box (changing card frames) and meanwhile Wizards is seeing Blizzard and other online cardgames more or less thake their business over. Long story sort, I believe Wizards designs cards nowadays quite wonderfully but is fully aware that sets need to be sold. Certain cards need to creep out of the regular power curve and otherwise cards will not sell that well. In a certain way third party sellers have more control over the way MtG sells as Wizard does.

For GW I feel the era of designing with sales in mind has passed. Beause indeed if this was the intend we'd see Maggotkin of Nurgle and Legions of Nagash completely thake over the game. GW has done this with WFB and where it led to is that the game bled out. The moral of the story here is that GW sells hobby products first and games second. Now they have made more and more progression for the game, which is awesome, but what needs to be more awesome is the models sold.
Luckily, because GW does not have a third party sellers line, design doesn't need to fold over the other previous sets sold. 

What it leads to is that balance is very important to make for MtG because MtG's sales depend on the tournament format.
On the other hand, this is not the case for GW at all. From GW's own marketing research (the stuff they did) it was still evident that most sales went to hobbyists. 

Lastly I think it's important to see that the more competitive the game becomes, the more elite the sales become and thus eventually cut into your own market. Because GW is really freeform in their designs for Age of Sigmar with Open, Narrative and Matched play it's also still very much accesable to all. They don't enforce you to use anything in particular.
Playing MtG in a casual way can be done, but the only way it's rewarded by WotC themselves is if you play Standard or Modern. Legacy gets thrown a bone from time to time but it's rare that MtG focusses on them. In addition to that my biggest concern for MtG right now is that they focus so much on Heartstone doing so well that they make some poor marketing and sales choices. That Bloodbraid Elf and Jace the Mindsculptor unbanning is fun for now but will come back to hurt them.

It would be like Games Workshop would suddenly say, ah remember that [insert name] [Bloodsecrator] stacking/comboing/debuffing, well you can do that in 2018 but in 2019 it's limited to one again.

[CoreCommander]

I'd also like to add a wild speculation of mine about why there may be a discrepancy on what fans want (or used to want) and what GW delivers(or used to deliver) in AoS. The crux may be that what GW values and what the fans value used to be two very different things.
 Having recently acquired all the RGW books (not having done a thorough comparison though) I'm maybe seeing a trend going from one book to the next and that is the number of photos/imagery vs text rules. As the realmgame books go forward the quantity of rules increases compared to the quantity of model pictures. I think that in the first book the board intentionally inserted more model pictures and art compared to rules and game supplements because in their eyes these were significantly harder to do than writing a paragraph with some bonuses that apply in a battle (and let's be frank, I can write such a blurb in about 5 seconds so I agree with them here). I think that the operating cost on painting 1000 stormcasts, arranging them in a diorama with real smoke  and then  running the image through some image processing tool is significantly higher and involves more people that writing a paragraph on the setting of AoS.
 This is why maybe GW thinks (or thought)  it is a good idea to provide vast quantities of these images even though gamers don't like them as they bring no rules with them - the board maybe thinking it is doing the fans a favour by supplying a service that is relatively more expensive and time consuming than writing rules (well these also double as a buyers catalog so it is good for them too ). 
 These days with all the social media and feedback given to them they naturally are beginning to deliver their clients what they value - rules. This wasn't the case in the beginning though and the reason may be just that - in the vacuum of no customer feedback they delivered what they thought was valuable and not what the customers thought was. I don't think that it was ever that obvious from a business point to deliver rules instead of other material. 

All of this can be applied to their rules design aswell - what the studio thinks you will enjoy because they poured so much effort into it and what you actually enjoy (a wild rule I came out 5 seconds ago and not having playtested it at all) may be two different things.  Then what the board will do with the things the studio produces is entirely another matter as they may have their own understanding on what you may enjoy...

 

[swarmofseals]

13 hours ago, Killax said:

 

From my perspective with a history in MtG and playing AoS now, the comparison is really hard to make. But I'll try to explain why:

These formats are what keep the cards expensive, what keep players going to event and basically are core sells for Wizards to keep in check.

Certain cards need to creep out of the regular power curve and otherwise cards will not sell that well. 

What it leads to is that balance is very important to make for MtG because MtG's sales depend on the tournament format.

Playing MtG in a casual way can be done, but the only way it's rewarded by WotC themselves is if you play Standard or Modern. Legacy gets thrown a bone from time to time but it's rare that MtG focusses on them. 

You're definitely not wrong that Magic and Warhammer are very different animals, but they do share enough core commonalities that I am comfortable in saying that I think a separate design/development team structure rather than having everyone do everything would work well for both systems.

I think your best point is that in game playability is like 99% of what drives Magic card sales. There are some folks who collect for the art or whatever but it's a huge minority. Compare to Warhammer of course where quite a lot of models get sold to people who are using the models for some purpose other than playing games of Warhammer. No doubt this has a strong influence on GW's business model as it should.

That being said, I don't think some of your other arguments are quite accurate. It's a very common misconception that tournament play is by far the biggest driver of MtG sales. It's really not, and Wizards has been pretty clear about this. Kitchen table players make up a much larger portion of the playerbase than you'd think. This is particularly true now that EDH is so popular. Now a lot of people just play EDH, even at a relatively serious level. EDH playability is a MAJOR driver of secondary market card prices. There are plenty of cards that are popular in EDH and command a solid price despite never seeing real tournament play. Of course Wizards has noticed this and now regularly releases supplementary products for EDH.

Wizards has also consistently put out "casual" sets over the past few years where the cards aren't even Standard or Modern playable and only one or two cards in the entire set might see a bit of Legacy play. 

I'd also argue that it's not just pure power creep that sells cards. Sometimes cards will be printed that are not that high power level but sell well because they combine well with previously printed cards. Other times cards are situationally powerful within a certain format but not actually pushed on raw power level. Certainly there are also plenty of examples of power creep cards to sell sets

Anyway, if anything all these arguments indicate to me that GW actually has the opportunity to put out a better balanced product than Wizards does because power level is less of a selling point for Warhammer than it is for Magic. 

 

Also, is there a reason why you spell take "thake"? I don't mean to be hostile, I'm genuinely curious!

[flemingmma]

Wizards intentionally dips the power level every few sets to avoid power creep, Ixilan for example had a lower power average than khaladesh and aether revolt. So power creep isn't the only way to sell cards. Yes the rares and ultra rares are often well above the power curve but most commons are eithet on or below it.

[Killax]

11 hours ago, swarmofseals said:

You're definitely not wrong that Magic and Warhammer are very different animals, but they do share enough core commonalities that I am comfortable in saying that I think a separate design/development team structure rather than having everyone do everything would work well for both systems.

I think your best point is that in game playability is like 99% of what drives Magic card sales. There are some folks who collect for the art or whatever but it's a huge minority. Compare to Warhammer of course where quite a lot of models get sold to people who are using the models for some purpose other than playing games of Warhammer. No doubt this has a strong influence on GW's business model as it should.

That being said, I don't think some of your other arguments are quite accurate. It's a very common misconception that tournament play is by far the biggest driver of MtG sales. It's really not, and Wizards has been pretty clear about this. Kitchen table players make up a much larger portion of the playerbase than you'd think. This is particularly true now that EDH is so popular. Now a lot of people just play EDH, even at a relatively serious level. EDH playability is a MAJOR driver of secondary market card prices. There are plenty of cards that are popular in EDH and command a solid price despite never seeing real tournament play. Of course Wizards has noticed this and now regularly releases supplementary products for EDH.

Wizards has also consistently put out "casual" sets over the past few years where the cards aren't even Standard or Modern playable and only one or two cards in the entire set might see a bit of Legacy play. 

I'd also argue that it's not just pure power creep that sells cards. Sometimes cards will be printed that are not that high power level but sell well because they combine well with previously printed cards. Other times cards are situationally powerful within a certain format but not actually pushed on raw power level. Certainly there are also plenty of examples of power creep cards to sell sets

Anyway, if anything all these arguments indicate to me that GW actually has the opportunity to put out a better balanced product than Wizards does because power level is less of a selling point for Warhammer than it is for Magic. 

*Also, is there a reason why you spell take "thake"? I don't mean to be hostile, I'm genuinely curious!

*Haha, I really don't know why I spelled take and not thake the above post. I'm not a native English speaker so that might be the issue. My apologies for the random English errors you'll often find in my post.

Unfortunatly our dissagreement will land where it is. As Wizards of the Coast is part of Hasbro and sales is what they do care for. This is why we see more and more wild cards from Wizards being pulled in order to either reduce production costs (and now work with an on average worse card product) or go out of bounds with their designs, no border lands, hidden treasures, all of it. So far this has been their strategy since I'd say 2010 to ensure sales quota are being met.

On the subject of EDH, this is another perfect example of them being sales driven, because EDH started existing since the 2000's and for around (correct me if I'm wrong) 14-15 years Wizards of the Coast did absolutely nothing with it and then they suddenly released it under the name Commander as 'their own made up system', there certainly where some rules added/different but other than those 4-5 years ago they where largely ignored. Same is strill true for Pauper and other formats. I am quite certain that this or next year Wizards will 'suddenly' do something with that format aswell. 

What I see is that Wizards in particular has a "cycle of 3" in terms of power creep followed by another cycle of 3 fun-stuff. Just to name an example, when we where in the Alara set we saw a lot of fun stuff, cascade, tons of multicolour, fun-stuff, stuff that will not be worth much for the third market. Then we saw the World Wake, a very small set with a ton of expensive cards now, sold like gold, still does and is what I'd call a power set. Followed by that again was (correct me if I'm wrong) Return to Mirrodin, we saw a return of Infect/Poison, counters everywhere and a lot of 'corruption' in narrative and fleshed out to art... Fun stuff. Set that followed, stronger again etc.

No matter how we turn the page, what I see is that one of the biggest design issues Wizards bumps into more often is related to the third party sellers. Their restricted list, their own dubious relation with Star City Games... For whatever reason, unlike Games Workshop, Wizards of the Coast decides to not thake a bite out of the direct sellers pie. Which in turn severely hinders them in cool designs for the future. The result of this (at least for me as a former fan of the game) is that Wizards basically copies what they did before and tries to make it cooler. A concept initiated with their "returns to" sets.

What I believe would be the healthiest thing for WotC to consider is to thake meassures in their own hands completely. Don't remove the third party sellers but certainly don't bend your design towards them. A restricted list is really a self imposed handicap if you ask me.

By GW comparison there isn't anything GW wouldn't do at this point. See Primaris, see Age of Sigmar. This is very healthy because it means you don't leave the design towards the fans. You leave it to your own compagny to set the future of your own game  

Back to GWs content writing structure
In any case, back to Games Workshop's design, I think that what is a huge profit for them is the reset that they had with Age of Sigmar which allows for a ton of fresh, new and creative ideas to excist. As fans of the Warhammer world knew, WFB's world was almost filled. I'd say they flesh out 80% of what was possible and all that was really left was more of a different thake on the same stuff. E.g. they could have fleshed out other non-Empire Human settlements, but these wouldn't be completely different from the Empire we allready knew... Same with Beastmen, we knew Cat-men excisted too as a form of Beastmen but fleshing that out would be more of the same, just with slightly different visual designs. So I'm happy with their new content.

So with Malign Portents as the latest example, I think Games Workshop, because of the community feedback, is more aware then ever. They saw that the narrative campaign products had a nice market but didn't really appeal to the maximum ammount of players because as someone who's still quite new into Age of Sigmar I;
1. Didn't know about Realmgate Wars when I started. I think that GW really could have pushed that button more.
2. Loved Firestorm but again missed some of the immersion online, basically to trigger me to get the product and now we see.
3. Malign Portent doing the whole online stories, voting, immersion shebang WITH an actually very cheap product to play it with AND some new models.

Thus so far I hope that every campaign that follows will follow the stepts of MP. As before I'd love to see a campaign for every Realm basically. The flavour of each realm is so different that even the tones we see for MP now directly affect immersion of the campaign and because of all that (stories included) I think it will be a great succes.

[DantePQ]

Basically it's not true that GW didn't pay attention to rules and competitive play, maybe they didn't but they do now. 

There was an article about Eldar Wraightknight (in 7ed) when design team new that it needs to cost much more but management disagreed and we were left with broken unit. 

Also look at Wh40k how FAQ try to balance things that were not fun to play against and too strong(conscripts, Ynnari, I guess Dark Reapers are next to be nerfed)

GW didn't good job with KO and Vanguard Wing quite fast  that's why  I don't understand why Changehost (and build that doesn't have many weakness especially with Gaunt) wasn't.

Apart from Changehost AoS seems to be quite balanced (taking only post GH2016 BT including Sylvaneth) right now so I guess they take some thought into balancing how army plays. 

[Killax]

17 minutes ago, DantePQ said:

Basically it's not true that GW didn't pay attention to rules and competitive play, maybe they didn't but they do now. 

There was an article about Eldar Wraightknight (in 7ed) when design team new that it needs to cost much more but management disagreed and we were left with broken unit. 

Also look at Wh40k how FAQ try to balance things that were not fun to play against and too strong(conscripts, Ynnari, I guess Dark Reapers are next to be nerfed)

GW didn't good job with KO and Vanguard Wing quite fast  that's why  I don't understand why Changehost (and build that doesn't have many weakness especially with Gaunt) wasn't.

Apart from Changehost AoS seems to be quite balanced (taking only post GH2016 BT including Sylvaneth) right now so I guess they take some thought into balancing how army plays. 

I don't think anyone said that GW didn't pay attention, they do and always did. What was stated is that design doesn't start out with a competitive mindset for Games Workshop. Tis is reflected in that Reddit AMA example you have. The design team wanted to pay attention to that, sales management wanted to press the sales.

Now more than ever Games Workshop pays attention to Open and Narrative play (campaigns etc) and Matched play (point costs) however what we also see is that competitive play in the Tournament sence is still not directly promoted by Games Workshop. Better put, it isn't Games Workshop that incites tournaments at LVO. They are around for the event but don't 'manage it' not in the way Wizards of the Coast manages tournaments. With their own set up customer information, judge program, all of that.

I think that Tzeentch was one of the first Battletomes to be released in such a way and I also believe some of the old ways of Games Workshop where still very much reflected into that. With tis I mean that at least for WFB GW did adopt a policy from time to time where the newest army was just a notch higher in power as the armies that preceded it. In that vein I think that GW sales management might have influenced design from that era. We see this much less in Battletomes that followed but both Fyreslayers and Seraphon are also incredibly strong in certain aspects which fits the idea that designers had less choice in the matter.

In addition, there seems to be a continious Tzeentch issue on forums, while I agree, it isn't like others can't compete and like Tzeentch dominates Tournament in the sence that they win all Tournaments... If anything more change for Tzeentch is comming up.