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


Dead Scribe

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1 hour ago, DerZauberer said:

Although this topic has been discussed several thousand time on TGA, i'll add something:

Several people got to know the terms "balance" and "OP" from videogames. Lets take Starcraft2 for example. There are 3 races in Starcraft2: Terran, Zerg and Protoss. Starcraft is said to be the most competetive and balanced out asymmetrical game ever existed in video game history, and with Korean GSL Players earning around 300.000$-800,000$ in playing Starcraft2 proves to me the game is in a good shape.

Mirrormatches, like Terran vs Terran or Zerg vs Zerg are 100% balanced, right? Everything is symmetrical. Map, Unit-Pool, etc.

But Protoss vs. Zerg?  

Following the recent SC2 Events Protoss is absolutly busted and unbalanced, allthough a finnish guy called Serral won WCS Global Finals 2018 with Zerg. The Community is under the heavy impression Protoss is "OP" and Zerg "Bad". That's ~70 unique Zerg, Terran and Protoss units not well balanced against each other, by a 75 billion dollar company balancing the game since nearly 10 years where the whole purpose of the game is to be the best balanced strategy game ever made, it is the eSport.

Now compare the small eco-system of Strarcraft 2 to AoS:

  • Asymetrical maps by default
  • Several hundreds of Warscrolls
  • Unique rules, e.g. Hand of Dust
  • Unique faction rules

We agree that two identical slaanesh lists are 100% balanced, right? But now deviate one-by-one each change you do to the lists and how it affects the pros and cons of the map, etc. You end up so hard in unknown territory that you can't say "what" or "how" something should be "buffed" or "nerfed", just that it needs a change due to pure gut-feeling. 

Videogames deliver with each interaction in the game data. They are determined in their numbers and you cant change them. You can't change the mission you are playing to favour one player or nerfing the damage of your Zergs. I can't choose which skills i use in dota, which units are available for me in starcraft, which weapons i can buy in counterstrike. You can't alter the balance of the game, so the typical videogamer goes to reddit and makes a karma winning topic "P R O T O S S E D" and how starcraft2 is bad.

In AoS you can be the balancing factor, you can bring units you usually dont use, you can tailor the objective to the weaker list, houserule stuff, etc.

When such a limited eco-system like a video game can't be balanced, how should GW balance such a vast eco-system that is Age of Sigmar?

Something I've wanted from GW is more specific terrain set-ups for scenarios. Terrain can have a huge impact on games and directly affects the value of abilities like flying. Though now that they've done it with Terrain cards in Warcry I've ran into the issue of people only wanting to play on terrain set-ups that EXACTLY matches a card so the fact that I assembled my Warcry terrain slightly differently renders it useless now. Still, its something I'd like to see explored more.

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1 hour ago, Moldek said:

The truth is that wargaming is a social contract. Personal interaction is THE MOST important factor in a fun game of AoS. Being able to have fun and to give your opponent a good time is crucial. I’m sure I could have fun being crushed by a tournament player if he’s nice about it, and I’m certain we could find ways for him to challenge himself : e.g giving me double the points to see if he can still beat me, etc.

 

GW tried the social contract approach and for many it was fine.  For others it required having social skills and thinking about others enjoyment.  They were a very loud voice and convinced GW to change its ways.

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48 minutes ago, Forrix said:

I've ran into the issue of people only wanting to play on terrain set-ups that EXACTLY matches a card so the fact that I assembled my Warcry terrain slightly differently renders it useless now

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

people man, if we could just get rid of people this game would be a lot more chill.

Edited by JPjr
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15 minutes ago, chord said:

GW tried the social contract approach and for many it was fine.  For others it required having social skills and thinking about others enjoyment.  They were a very loud voice and convinced GW to change its ways.

Social contracts can be pretty subjective from LGS to LGS, you need to impose structure if you want to at least start having a conversation about competitive gaming.

Looking at balance, I just wish that once all the armies are updated to the same edition there is less of "haves vs have nots".  Remember when we thought Nighthaunt was a 2.0 battletome? Looking at things now it certainly feels closer to a 1.0 tome. I'm not sure how GW does their rule design but I would have hoped that they had ideas like activation wars, faction specific terrain and endless spells, and Stormhosts (hallmarks of 2.0 AoS) brewing for awhile, so why do we have such a huge gap? To be clear, I'm not saying that every AoS 2.0 army needs to check all of those boxes, but it'd be nice for each army to check a few!  Especially when it comes to powerful abilities like modifying combat order.

Instead it feels more like each army is designed only looking backwards, instead of forwards.  As an example regarding activation wars we started with Idoneth (everyone fights first once per game-ish), to Nighthaunt (a unit can fight first if they get an unmodified 10 to charge), to FEC (activation wars with command abilities) and Slaanesh (passive abilities to force enemies to fight last).  

I'm also a salty NH player so take it all with a grain of salt.

Edited by relic456
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You know @chord, as much as I like narrative gaming you're not helping its popularity. You sounds like competitive play shouldn't even exist. And GW still creates content for narrative and open play,  just because there's no Realmgate Wars 2: Electric Boogaloo doesn't mean non-matched play is dead. Look at the Blanchitsu community. Their games are "story first, rules are distant secon". During Tor Megiddo campaign (I know, it's 40k, but the  system doesn't matter) they even had rule that if someone wants to do something rules does not support on 4+ it succeeds because cool story was more important than strict ruleset.

EDIT: But I think that's a topic for different thread.

 

Edited by michu
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Over lunch I had a talk with a few players at work.  Something that I thought was interesting was that the consideration is that if all games are equally unbalanced (what is commonly put forth), the problem is not that people have a problem with balance, its that people have a problem with the rules, but are not wanting to change games.

The theory being other games have less complaining because the people accept their own games balance issues but like the game.

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56 minutes ago, michu said:

You know @chord, as much as I like narrative gaming you're not helping its popularity. You sounds like competitive play shouldn't even exist. And GW still creates content for narrative and open play,  just because there's no Realmgate Wars 2: Electric Boogaloo doesn't mean non-matched play is dead. Look at the Blanchitsu community. Their games are "story first, rules are distant secon". During Tor Megiddo campaign (I know, it's 40k, but the  system doesn't matter) they even had rule that if someone wants to do something rules does not support on 4+ it succeeds because cool story was more important than strict ruleset.

EDIT: But I think that's a topic for different thread.

 

Not at all, I just think the community was doing a good job of it prior to GW introducing points.  The pools w/sideboard was a nice way to to handle it, plus with some of the human swarm AI a community led open source system would probably be more "accurate" and "balanced" than anything GW can do.  It would have the potential of all AoS players globally to help "balance" the game whereas GW only leverages a small number with some play testers. 

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Eh from what I saw there wasn't a huge amount of unity in the community. Granted part of that was a large split between "AoS" and "Ninth Age Fantasy"; but you've also got huge issues because:

1) Not everyone comes online

2) Not everyone can agree what the game should be. This is a huge issue and even at a local level different clubs might have used different rule sets. 

Heck just start a thread on Open Play and see how many vast difference you get even in a small sample of online users. Some are simply games without a campaign using the core rules but with some story context; others are full blown custom rules sets. 

 

Could AoS have built its own international community of gamers around their own rules system? Perhaps but I'd wager it would have been a nightmare to get there and that's before having GW on the "outside" and liable to drop or add models/armies/units without much warning. 

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20 minutes ago, Dead Scribe said:

I think you're the first person I've heard say that.  Most people that talk about the time before GW had points describe it as a bad time where fan comps were breaking the game even worse than they are today.

Going back to WFB 8th, I remember a lot of people playing Swedish Comp, since it "fixed" a lot of the balance issues at tournaments at the time (ex. Banner of the World Dragon was an incredibly powerful item). It's not surprising that that team went on to make T9A.

Balance will always be a topic of conversation and there isn't any changing that. The Time and Money that has to be invested into a new army to bring it to tabletop ready is significantly greater than the time/money invested into complaining online about how "easy" it would be to balance things. Contrast was such an amazing product for getting in new players, and then these price hikes just keep new/40K players from getting in.

IMO, most of the Youtubers/Podcasters/Battle Reporters had a better feel for what was crazy/overpowered/underpowered/needs buffs/needs nerfs than what GW did in General's Handbook 2019. No, it did not help that the most broken armies (FEC/Skaven/Slaanesh) were released in a time-period between both books in which they could not be fixed in time, but those weren't the only armies.

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And a global community can respond faster than GW to "imbalance".

Plus if you look into swarm AI with human input, it could really leverage the collective knowledge of the community for a more accurate balancing system. Especially since the data model could take into account artifacts/allegiance abilities/etc

47 minutes ago, Dead Scribe said:

I think you're the first person I've heard say that.  Most people that talk about the time before GW had points describe it as a bad time where fan comps were breaking the game even worse than they are today.

Most of them were just sore about the End Times, for those who played AOS pre-points, it was fun and enjoyable.    Were the comps perfect? No.  But it was a lot more flexible than the points system currently used.   I think the most highly regarded was SCGT Comp and it seemed accurate for the time. 

In fact if set up like most open source projects GW could be in charge of approving the pull requests while the community works together to identity "bugs" with the current balancing. 

Just brain storming on how we can improve the system 

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I think a few people in this chat need to go try 9th age... A few of you seem like your not interested in GW matched play. Which is fine... but it is hard to listen to the same complaint over and over again that the game was better without points... or that we the community should just house rule the game.

Balance in matched play could be improved yes. Summoning is particularly bad at the moment. But I'd rather play GWs game than a fan made mess of matched play. And guess what... if you want to introduce house rules or modify points you can... it's called narrative / open play.

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1 hour ago, chord said:

And a global community can respond faster than GW to "imbalance".

Plus if you look into swarm AI with human input, it could really leverage the collective knowledge of the community for a more accurate balancing system. Especially since the data model could take into account artifacts/allegiance abilities/etc

This exists... it's called 9th age. I don't understand what you want. 9th age is community 8th ed.

If you want this for AOS why not make it? call it 9th realm or something. All the power to you. I won't be interested in this game but would your efforts not be better served starting this project then complaining about GW matched play on TGA?

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1 hour ago, chord said:

Most of them were just sore about the End Times, for those who played AOS pre-points, it was fun and enjoyable.

How is it helpful to make generic statements about how a whole population felt about a topic? I for one was not sore about End Times. I bought the starter set at launch. Sure some people might have liked it. I did not. The game was only enjoyable when I played with a buddy and we played a form of what you would call narrative now.

Edited by svnvaldez
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5 minutes ago, svnvaldez said:

How is it helpful to make generic statements about how a whole population felt about a topic? I for one was not sore about End Times. I bought the starter set at launch. Sure some people might have liked it. I did not. The game was only enjoyable when I played with a buddy and we played a form of what you would call narrative now.

You mean like the generic statements that AoS was bad before points? 

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7 minutes ago, chord said:

You mean like the generic statements that AoS was bad before points? 

No one should make any generic statements whether or not something is good or bad. We all should only be providing our personal experience. My personal experience with AOS prior to matched play / points in the original GH was not positive.

I also think that GW has been clear Matched play is here to stay. It has been in every GH since the first. So has Narrative and Open.

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33 minutes ago, Nezzhil said:

I think the two principal problems are summoning and the cheap/free attack&not response mechanics...

Forget the discussion of whether AOS is balance / should be more balanced / Etc

Those two principal problems imo lead to a non interactive game. Non interaction does not lead to a fun game in any setting i think. AOS  seems to have had waves of non interaction with slaanesh being particularly bad currently.

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+++ MOD HAT +++

Just a reminder that we're all entitled to our opinions on this and no one person's opinion is more "right" than somebody else's.  AoS is great as a platform because it allows lots of different play styles - but that does mean that the overall game system is going to have a few compromises in, in order to provide that flexibility.

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For me personally I believe there should be some imbalance in the game. Just not too much. Some imbalance is a great equaliser between player skill. If you have so called "perfect balance" then the better player is always going to win, it's decided before you even put models down, how is that fun for anyone? If there's at least some imbalance then the better player takes a below average army and the not so good player takes an above average army suddenly you have a competitive  game on your hands.

That being said, the difference between top and bottom shouldn't be a yawning gulf and GW are headed in a very good direction with this. Most armies have the 2.0 battle tome now that brings them up towards the average, and over the course of the next year the rest will probably be brought in line. That only leaves the "top" end and really there's only 2 outliers here, Slaanesh and DoK(specifically witch brew). Bring those in line and whilst the game won't have "perfect balance" it will be balanced in a way that is healthy for the game.

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Id say just look at the state of 40k. 8th edition was supposed to be the best and 'simplest' form of 40k ever and now look at it. The battletome power creep is nothing compared to the power creep of 40k codexes. A game of this size will never be truely balanced as there is way too many factors to look at and consider. 

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