Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?

[Televiper11]

To quote from Forrix in the Cities thread:

Posted 1 hour ago

  16 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

I think it only gets playtested by people that have no other cavalry. Or monsters. Or infantry.

Honestly, considering some of the stuff that slips through I think its safe to say their playtesters are either incompetent, aren't being listened to, or that playtesting isn't actually taking place. I suppose I could add a fourth option that playtesting is being rushed so not everything gets tested though that kind of falls into the 3rd category.

Edited October 22, 2019 by Televiper11

[zilberfrid]

2 minutes ago, Televiper11 said:

To quote from Forrix in the Cities thread:

Posted 1 hour ago

  16 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

I think it only gets playtested by people that have no other cavalry. Or monsters. Or infantry.

Honestly, considering some of the stuff that slips through I think its safe to say their playtesters are either incompetent, aren't being listened to, or that playtesting isn't actually taking place. I suppose I could add a fourth option that playtesting is being rushed so not everything gets tested though that kind of falls into the 3rd category.

My post was specifically about the Drakespawn Knights, which are simply bad. New reports on how they do will not come from people that have another choice they can make for the points.

[Televiper11]

1 minute ago, zilberfrid said:

My post was specifically about the Drakespawn Knights, which are simply bad. New reports on how they do will not come from people that have another choice they can make for the points.

That's true but Forrix's response is about the whole Cities tome specifically, and the game itself generally. My apologies if you felt misconstrued by inclusion. I should've removed your quote.

[zilberfrid]

4 minutes ago, Televiper11 said:

That's true but Forrix's response is about the whole Cities tome specifically, and the game itself generally. My apologies if you felt misconstrued by inclusion. I should've removed your quote.

Oh, I was in no way offended, I just wanted to specify, without speaking about a specific unit, my comment feels weird.

[TheCovenLord]

1 hour ago, Televiper11 said:

To quote from Forrix in the Cities thread:

Posted 1 hour ago

  16 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

I think it only gets playtested by people that have no other cavalry. Or monsters. Or infantry.

Honestly, considering some of the stuff that slips through I think its safe to say their playtesters are either incompetent, aren't being listened to, or that playtesting isn't actually taking place. I suppose I could add a fourth option that playtesting is being rushed so not everything gets tested though that kind of falls into the 3rd category.

I doubt there is no playtesting taking place. But with the vast array of options available within each army and each unique army situation what I do doubt it the amount of useful data any form of playtesting can generate. Small sample size and the impossibility of testing each army against each other army (disregarding minute unit differences/archetypes/unit sizes/unit selections etc.) in enough trials to be statistically rigorous render this phase mostly moot. It is why so many broken interactions make it to the live game where thousands of data points are generated by the public. 

 

It is why I firmly advocate for a public playtest period (for egregious ****** that would appear many many times within hundreds or even thousands of submitted public testers data). As well as AI/Simulated data generated to pinpoint potential issues for better FAQs/Erratas.  As for the drakespawn knights, a sore disappointment to be sure, especially as an aelf player. If they had kept the typo allowing them to retain the rerolls 1's and 2's (their version of old darkshield) and the 3+ save they would almost have a niche as an expensive mobile tarpit. Sadly this was not the case. 

Edited October 22, 2019 by TheCovenLord

[stratigo]

The games designers often don’t listen to play testers. And the play testers aren’t homogenous in their opinions, so it can easily be a case where the testers with the opinions that a designer already likes get listened to

 

but even then flat straight, I don’t know how slaanesh got missed

[Forrix]

Oh hey, I got like super quoted in this thread :P. I think my fourth guess about shorted playtesting time frames is the most likely given some more time to think about..

 

17 minutes ago, TheCovenLord said:

I doubt there is no playtesting taking place. But with the vast array of options available within each army and each unique army situation what I do doubt it the amount of useful data any form of playtesting can generate. Small sample size and the impossibility of testing each army against each other army (disregarding minute unit differences/archetypes/unit sizes/unit selections etc.) in enough trials to be statistically rigorous render this phase mostly moot. It is why so many broken interactions make it to the live game where thousands of data points are generated by the public. 

I generally agree with this but some of the stuff that makes it through (like the aforementioned Drakespawn Knights or the pre-nerf Gristlegore General) are so out of whack that it doesn't really take much in the way of playtesting to see that they're either wildly under or over powered. That said, in Cities there are a metric ton of warscrolls. It is possible depending on their testing that they basically ran out of time before getting to them. Or there was a last minute change right before the deadline. Likewise with Flesh Eater courts its possible Gristlegore was the last court to be made and playtesters never got around to it. Or mount traits were added at the last second so Terrorgheists weren't rerolling hits on their maw for the actual testing.

[gjnoronh]

Heck we know some of our forum members are play testers.  In fact I believe Ben Curry who runs this forum is one of the playtesters.   

But playtesting is tough see my previous post on the difficulty of getting balance right. 

[Sleboda]

3 hours ago, stratigo said:

The games designers often don’t listen to play testers.

Having been a tester in the past and knowing others, I can verify this. It was a top two or three item on the list of frustrations back in the day.

 

There are some very good people testing these days, from ultra competitive folks, to hobby nerds, to people who are just very, very good at AoS. The testing is getting done and it's quality testing. The most likely point of failure is with those receiving the feedback from the testers, in my (experienced in the past) opinion.

[Panzer]

Heck GW straight out said they got told by the playtesters that the Iron Hands rules would be too powerful but they wanted to see how the community will react first. 😅

[prochuvi]

We know that playtesting is done because some people doing those test have told us.

 

But seeing armys as slanesh or skaven we can guess that gw dont give a ****** about the testers opinions or the balance

[Dead Scribe]

7 hours ago, AaronWilson said:

I think the reason balance is posted about so much is the point that don't really care about it / accepted it's not balanced are busy enjoying the world of sigmar, enjoying hobby projects, enjoying beer and pretzel games, enjoy the game for it's atmospheric games and community and not posting online complaining about balance.

Thats very virtuous of you.

But there are people that do care about the game as the game, not for its atmosphere or enjoying beer & pretzel, and so it will be discussed often if it is found to be deficient.

[chord]

5 hours ago, gjnoronh said:

But playtesting is tough see my previous post on the difficulty of getting balance right. 

This is where if GW embraces data science and technology they can use that to help provide balance. 

[schwabbele]

10 hours ago, Dead Scribe said:

beer & pretzel

Everyone enjoys beer and pretzels 😍

[AaronWilson]

11 hours ago, Dead Scribe said:

Thats very virtuous of you.

But there are people that do care about the game as the game, not for its atmosphere or enjoying beer & pretzel, and so it will be discussed often if it is found to be deficient.

I agree, but earlier oon you posted "if so many people don't care about balance why are there so many threads about it?"

That's because those that are happy don't spend time to go online writing about how much fun they're having, they're just enjoying the game but those are unhappy will vocalise it

[gjnoronh]

17 hours ago, chord said:

This is where if GW embraces data science and technology they can use that to help provide balance. 

With all respect I'm not sure you read the thread I linked to   it's worth a read if you are into thinking about the science of balancing a very complicated game.  

I work in data intensive research.   The problem is you don't have enough underlying information to do big data type analysis prior to releasing a book into the wild.  Read the thread for a discussion about the kind of information you'd want (and right now there is no standardized system to actually quantify i.e. player skill level)  Post being out in the wild if you could log the results of all the games you'd have a huge data set - but still not have information on underlying factors (heavy terrain, light terrain, skill level of the player.)     For example Nighthaunt look a lot worse on a limited elevated terrain board then they do on a board with lots and lots of very tall pieces they can move onto, or that significantly impede the movement of their opponent.    

And you'd still be asking yourself philosophically do we balance an army so it's balanced when two players of average skill play each other or when two highly skilled players play each other.   The experience of most GW customers is driven by  something around the 'average skill level' answer, the results of GT's which people tend to pay attention to are driven by the highly skilled answer.  For many games and factions the answers will not be the same.  

Edited October 23, 2019 by gjnoronh

[chord]

2 hours ago, gjnoronh said:

With all respect I'm not sure you read the thread I linked to   it's worth a read if you are into thinking about the science of balancing a very complicated game.  

I work in data intensive research.   The problem is you don't have enough underlying information to do big data type analysis prior to releasing a book into the wild.  Read the thread for a discussion about the kind of information you'd want (and right now there is no standardized system to actually quantify i.e. player skill level)  Post being out in the wild if you could log the results of all the games you'd have a huge data set - but still not have information on underlying factors (heavy terrain, light terrain, skill level of the player.)     For example Nighthaunt look a lot worse on a limited elevated terrain board then they do on a board with lots and lots of very tall pieces they can move onto, or that significantly impede the movement of their opponent.    

And you'd still be asking yourself philosophically do we balance an army so it's balanced when two players of average skill play each other or when two highly skilled players play each other.   The experience of most GW customers is driven by  something around the 'average skill level' answer, the results of GT's which people tend to pay attention to are driven by the highly skilled answer.  For many games and factions the answers will not be the same.  

I get it, sure the data is not there currently but part of actually having GW start to get into this method would be setting up the ways to collect that information.  

Agreed, the various game attributes matter but developing the data model is not one n done its something that evolves over time becoming more sophisticated as time goes on.  

I'm not saying starting out it will be perfect and easy but its not a reason to keep on with what is a broken way of doing it. 

[gjnoronh]

Go read the thread - please. 

 

Lets say you ask every player in the world to log their  results, their terrain, and their skill level.  Do you think you could even  accurately get players to self assess their skill level? 

Maybe you can  get players to get you the data and can stratify it by scenario, match up,  points level, realm, player skill levels, terrain density, terrain height, use of GW terrain warscrolls.  Even if you start with tens of thousands of data points   to evaluate  when you are trying to determine balance you are going to have a lot of unique pairings of those variables to consider and end up with much smaller amounts of games in a specific situation to try and do analysis on

Computer gaming has it easier because all the data is captured on the interface - most games tend to have a way of assessing player success (as a proxy for skill level) and everything else is part of the existing data set as defined they've got access to.  

Old school computing had the GIGO mantra "Garbage In= Garbage Out "   if you don't know if you've got garbage for your inputs you can't rely on your outputs.  Big data analysis can do some amazing thing but it's limited by having access to enough of the variables that are part of those data points to do something useful.  

[stratigo]

15 hours ago, AaronWilson said:

I agree, but earlier oon you posted "if so many people don't care about balance why are there so many threads about it?"

That's because those that are happy don't spend time to go online writing about how much fun they're having, they're just enjoying the game but those are unhappy will vocalise it

“Truly there is indeed a silent unseen majority who agree with me”. You know, this rings hollow pretty much everywhere, from the makeup of political parties to the opinions on board games 

[Mayple]

2 hours ago, stratigo said:

“Truly there is indeed a silent unseen majority who agree with me”. You know, this rings hollow pretty much everywhere, from the makeup of political parties to the opinions on board games 

That's hardly what he said though. He was referencing the vocal minority/silent majority, which is basic human psychology, and far from some unproven hypothesis, no? Or do you disagree with that basis? 

[Panzer]

4 hours ago, stratigo said:

“Truly there is indeed a silent unseen majority who agree with me”. You know, this rings hollow pretty much everywhere, from the makeup of political parties to the opinions on board games 

He didn't say anything about majority and neither did he say anything about he himself leaning into the one or the other direction. All he said is that people who are happy with something are less likely to go and post about it online, which is a fact. Like it or not.

[Elmir]

On 10/21/2019 at 6:09 PM, Televiper11 said:

They should beta-test digitally then do a physical release with the final adjustments. Points changes yearly are fine.

I would much rather they went full card system for the rules: cards for allegiances, for artifacts, for spells, for everything. Make lovely looking binders so you can tailor your book to your army (with all necessary rules in one binder) and rules diffusion is no longer a problem. 

If one card/ability is utterly busted, just replace that one a year later along with GHB as an updated cardpack. 

And use the freed up space in the battletomes for more background, more painting tips, more "historical battles" your army partook in versus various factions so your gaming group can re-enact those moment better. 

You might even reduce piracy this way as well. 

[AaronWilson]

10 hours ago, stratigo said:

“Truly there is indeed a silent unseen majority who agree with me”. You know, this rings hollow pretty much everywhere, from the makeup of political parties to the opinions on board games 

I mean that's not what I meant or what I even said I don't think but sure

[Kasper]

The recent stats for Slaanesh are to be expected from experience, but pretty gross nontheless. I really think it shows that GW need to take into consideration how armies can intereact with certain mechanics that they introduce. I realize all armies and troops can't be the same naked warscroll and this would also be boring, but if your army can't interact with the "activation wars" atm. as an example, you are left in the dirt, which is what the stats display. This also often leaves a really bad gaming experience for especially people on the receiving end.

New mechanics are cool and "needed" with armies going forward, but there gotta be some way of playing around it or competiting with it.

[amysrevenge]

Honest question.

If there were 20 factions, and 18 of them were at 50% win ratio, one was at 51%, and one was at 49%, do you think there would be the same level of outrage-filled rhetoric as we have now?