A Suggestion on Balance

[Vakarian]

Balance has been a hot topic on here of late, and a serious part of the problem among AoS players, and GW, seems to be that no one really knows how factions are doing outside of the reports posted by some (very industrious and much appreciated) folks like the Honest Wargamer and AoS Shorts (I’m sure I’m missing some, I’m sorry!). 
 

Here’s a though based on how another popular gaming company with a vibrant and growing competitive scene does things: track every tournament round via a computer system, run by TOs, that reports tournament results to GW. GW can then act at the 6-month intervals based on serious feedback from all competitive events. Will GW actually do this? I doubt it, and they don’t have to - but it’s worked well for Corvus Belli and Infinity so far. Yes, I know that GW is at least an order of magnitude greater in representation (and yes, I actually mean a real order of magnitude), but computerizing this takes out most of the work. 
 

Here’s Infinity’s 6-month stats, provided by Corvus Belli themselves to the community, taken from every tournament played worldwide in the last 6 months. This is what a balanced tabletop game looks like. 

[swarmofseals]

It's a fantastic idea. Only problem is the upfront investment, which is probably a hard sell for GW.

[schwabbele]

Great idea, but probably not going to happen.

Regarding upfront costs, they make millions , so no issue there. The hard sell is, why do something which is probably not going to make us more money.

[Skoll]

The best part is that tournaments already report a lot of this data for free.

 

If GW cared all they'd have to do is ask major tourneys to hand over the data and then they could organize it and republish it

[Vakarian]

I don’t honestly expect GW to implement a system like this, but I did want to at least show that it can be done. 
 

AoS balance doesn’t need to be what Infinity’s is, and GW isn’t CB. But it seems to be a chronic complaint that GW isn’t actually aware of imbalances, and the only way to fix that issue objectively is to track faction metrics in competitions. There are other, subjective methods (reviewers’ comments, etc.), but those don’t have the same weight as real-world data. 

[Mutton]

Having as much information as possible certainly helps. I'd also like to note that Infinity has a very different design philosophy compared to AoS. Despite having a number of factions with various specialties that give them different play styles, the game still revolves around ingrained rules that don't really change. Factions are varied because they have better or worse hackers, infiltrators, etc., and units are unique because one might have Holoprojector Lv1 while another has Mimetism---static skills assigned like keywords. Infinity is a tighter, leaner wargame with fewer paths of error by virtue of the restricted design space.

Age of Sigmar's factions and units, in comparison, all have strikingly different rules, and are really only limited by the writers' imaginations. Khorne have blood tithe, Ogors count more for objectives, Slaves have Chaos Marks, Idoneth have a whole chart of phases, Tzeentch have destiny die, etc. Units can go first in combat inherently, when they charge, if they spend a command point, etc. There's a gulf of disparity between two warscrolls in AoS compared to the narrow gap between two models in Infinity. GW rules writers are always pushing the bounds of what can be done within their rule set, which can often mean breaking it in places.

These two methods by Corvus Belli and GW don't mean either is better than the other, but it does mean they're shooting for different goals and that the road to balance isn't equally obtainable. Can GW do better in assuring us that things like Slaanesh, Tzeentch, Petrifex, or what have you don't crop up? Of course. I also don't believe they could ever attain the balance of a game like Infinity, but I also wouldn't want them to. Trying to achieve perfect balance would mean reducing all warscrolls and abilities to a deeply limited selection of things like, "reroll 1's to hit" or "add 1 to wound." 

The GW designers aren't ignorant of what goes on in tournaments, that's been shown time and time again, which is why I don't think even more statistics would contribute much to their thought process. They've already moved from yearly changes to bi-yearly, and I think it's been working. The massive cracks in the process come from not enough development time, editing, and QA. These are things that, though I have no evidence to support this, I believe partially lies at the feet of the corporate GW system itself; and it very well may be that the rules writers simply don't have the time (or staff) needed in the early phases of each project. All things considered, they do a laudable job at keeping every faction playable (not to mention completely unique).

Edited January 29, 2020 by Mutton

[Doko]

Gw know very well when a army is broken but they prefer it that way so they get money fast of tournament players and then 9 months later they can balance it when they have got the money of tournaments players allready

[Vakarian]

I generally have a hard time believing that tournament players “chasing the meta” actually make GW all that much money. The 40K guys I know buy the hotness off of eBay as often as they buy it from GW (a lot of them really don’t like to paint). And GW has a spotty record, at best, of making rules so good for purely new factions that they could be logically inferred as done to drive sales. 
 

@Mutton, I do agree that they (GW) listen to the tournament results they know about, and your point that Infinity is different is well-taken. 
 

That said:

1. Infinity does balance some “unique” rules that one or only a few factions have, and those rules rarely (if at all) skew individual faction performance. 
 

2. Infinity has a complex set of interactions in-faction, even with the restricted design space that you noted, and balancing the effects of the many and varied rules within a faction takes a good amount of work. Yes, CB and GW have different philosophies, and so to some extent this isn’t going to change, but *if* they want to try to increase player satisfaction, there’s probably some lessons they could learn from CB’s approach.

 

Agreed, AoS is certainly harder to balance. It has a lot more going on. The player base also has generally lower expectations of the game and of GW. But, a lot of us on here seem to care, and I’m sure GW cares at least to the point that they don’t want new players (and by that, I mean new and potential return customers) to drop the game and hobby out of frustration with serious imbalance. 
 

AoS will never be Infinity, and I don’t want it to be, but GW might be able to learn a thing or two from CB, if they’re willing to look at the processes CB uses. 

[Fairbanks]

25 minutes ago, Vakarian said:

I generally have a hard time believing that tournament players “chasing the meta” actually make GW all that much money.

A month ago, I would have been right with you.

19 players bringing OBR to LVO, all taking Petrifex Elite, being the largest represented faction makes me think some people do meta-chase. Makes you wonder how many of those guys are currently building a Tzeentch army.

[Kadeton]

Bravo to Corvus Belli for taking such a proactive, data-driven approach to balance. Having put in the initial effort of setting up that reporting system, I imagine it has paid for itself many times over as an invaluable tool in their game design process. The fact that it's also an open portal through which the community can scrutinise the results of their balancing efforts (as well as run their own meta-analysis) is genuinely courageous.

It's true that AoS is a different beast in terms of complexity, but I don't think that's the end of the discussion. The underlying fact is that CB and GW have very different corporate culture. CB is inviting that scrutiny, holding themselves accountable and being transparent about the health of the game, as well as putting particular emphasis on tournament play. GW takes a much more traditional approach - secretive, sales-driven, and communicating only via marketing. They could make a deliberate choice to change that culture, but given how well they're doing I strongly doubt they see any reason to rock the boat.

So I don't think we'll see anything like that for AoS in the foreseeable future. It runs directly counter to the way GW prefers to do business.

[Doko]

1 hour ago, Vakarian said:

I generally have a hard time believing that tournament players “chasing the meta” actually make GW all that much money

I agree that tournaments players wont be a big chunk from sales but my point is: we have 3 type of clients.

 

A: collectors,buy models and army that like the lore etc and get every unit from the army to collect it 100%(my case)

 

B: painters,buy models cool looking to paint

 

😄😄 tounaments player who buy only the best army and units

So if a army have bad rules client A and B gonna buy it if they are interested in the models because they dont care rules but not client C. And if have good rules those clients A and B gonna buy it again only if interested in the models but now client C gonna buy it too.

 

So put overpowers rules is a win for gw and the reason that they have been doing it(powercreep is a real thing in aos)

[Vakarian]

I agree that GW has an incentive to commit to powercreep to sell new models. I just don’t believe they actually succeed at that achieving that  powercreep consistently in practice, and I don’t think the incentive is as great as we make it out to be here.

There are two logical options, then: 

 

First option—if GW wants to sell models with ever-better rules, then why the lackluster StD release? Why were so many Idoneth units just not great? Why is new Sylvaneth just “meh”? Why were KO’s and Mawtribes’ release just “good” rather than crazy? It’s not like DoT, Orruks, or Cities have any new models they need to sell. 40K backs me up on this point, too: how great are the new Sisters? GW is either comically inept at writing powercreep, or:

 

Second option—they really do just care more about the models and the hobby/narrative crowd (your A and B groups) than they do about the competitive side. I genuinely believe this is the case, and that GW “wants” balance in the sense that they don’t want people to dislike their game, but they aren’t really good at it, and don’t have a great sense of how to get there (or maybe they think they do, and it just isn’t working). 
 

My main point in posting CB’s method is to say this: balance is better for everyone. Narrative games are more fun when the forces at play at least have a snowball’s chance of winning. Since GW is more committed to this sort of player, I don’t expect CB-level balance. But, they could benefit the narrative game by looking at a broader pool of tournament data to at least have some idea of how unbalanced some factions in AoS are. 

[RuneBrush]

I think the idea is great, but I'm not sure it's going to be particularly useful without also providing loads of context.  As an example over the past few days on here we've discussed quite a bit on the results from the bumper weekend of AoS that just occurred.  We all know that Petrifex Elite is an amazing build - we've been told this by experts out on the internet and seen the actual rules in the book.  Despite this the placings for Bonereapers were all over the shop.  Without context we don't know why - had other players reacted to the meta and brought hard counters?  Were some of the players simply inexperienced with the army?  Were some of the players so hungover from the previous night they were an easy opponent?  Without that context Bonereapers appear to be pretty balanced with a range of results.  Tzeentch on the other hand appears to be hugely out of hand on the surface - but it's equally plausible that the people bringing a Tzeentch army could be veterans from the last book (unlike Bonereapers that have no veterans)?  Were other players unprepared for this build of army?  In reality it will likely be a mixture of reasons the stats are as they are.  Just looking at tournament results to make changes will result in unnecessary adjustments and rules changes that are more extreme than they need to be.

What I would say though is that GW are taking note.  Many of the AoS team read forums such as this, keep an eye on social media and look at the results from events (they're all AoS players who enjoy the game).  At the GT this weekend you had Sam Pearson going round talking to players and seeing what's happening - which is going to give a much more accurate view on where changes are needed.

One point I'll also make is that I don't think what we're actually after is "balance".  Instead what I'd say we're actually after two very specific things.  Firstly that one or two builds aren't dominating games (it makes events boring and very one-sided).  Secondly we'd like all armies to be capable of winning some games.  Most of us don't have an issue being beaten by a better player with a solid army, what we take exception to is somebody who's played two games smashing us into the ground because their army is virtually unbeatable.

[JPjr]

9 minutes ago, RuneBrush said:

What I would say though is that GW are taking note.  Many of the AoS team read forums such as this, keep an eye on social media and look at the results from events (they're all AoS players who enjoy the game). 

Case in point...

 

[whispersofblood]

On DoT. I think we should be pretty open about how drastic the levels of strategic talent are out there. Watching nominally good players, play against changehost and setting tactical goals they have no way of achieving was pretty revealing. 

I would say a great number of players take strategic solutions from the internet rather than develop them in the field. Which is why any faction that doesn't play similarly to other factions is going to over achieve, like KO, Skyfire spam, HoS KoS spam, etc. 

DoT are an extremely powerful strategically, they dominate the board space, and if your army isn't mobile it will be taken a part, and even worse if it has point concentrations. Worse they have specific rule mechanics you need to know or your strategies can come unglued, worse yet ranged dmg as all but left the game for the most competitive factions.

On the other hand some things are very effecient. Rolling 3 flamers against my rogue idol was pretty revealing. And having 27" of threat projection, with almost no retaliation at under 150 points, is possibly something new.

[Spears]

I recently Took a bunch of screenshots to try and demonstrate just how good the Infinity Tournament System is. 

By tying in the ITS login to the army builder and tournament organiser its possible to track not only win rates of the faction, but who was playing them and against whom all the way down to unit level. (not all of this is directly available through the portal).

Now I'm not saying its flawless and I'm not sure Cb always get their balancing right but it does make attending a GW event feel slightly quaint with TTO etc.

Edit: how on earth do i paste in a tweet like that above? 

First up is Infinity Army a free army builder that links straight to the rules wiki.

From here you can submit your lists straight to the tournament manager used for pairing on the day. Results effect your global elo and gaming style achievements. All that data is then used to monitor the performance and popularity of armies and missions.

 

Edited January 29, 2020 by Spears

[Vakarian]

Like Spears said, CB’s tracking goes right down to the units people select in the army builder they provide online for free. So they even have an idea of how popular specific units and builds are. That means they have some idea of what units need to be tweaked in addition to how specific factions are performing.

 

As for this weekend’s results—that’s why this should be done on a 6-month timescale and not faster. OBR Petrifex may still be OP. DoT may not be as OP as some are claiming, especially since the complaints seem to have (in some large part) come from OBR players. GW is right to tackle the FAQs and points changes over a period of time in which they can see how things even out. It would be even more helpful if they had *all* the information available and not just that which gets repeated the loudest in the after-event discussion on the internet. 
 

 

[Dolomyte]

To be fair the tzeentch complaints came from everyone including the people winning with tzeentch. Usually not a good sign. And the OBR thing is why I support the six month update system. Cavalry were incredibly broken so they got fixed in the two week update, as changehost should be, now we get to see a few months of data on how they are performing and make additional tweaks as needed. OBRs biggest complaint should not be their power level for petrifex, it should be how boring petrifex is to play and play against. Either you get a mission with one or two objectives which they can most likely win or they get a mission with 6 to 8 they have little to no chance of winning. 

[Dolomyte]

Infinity is a different game. If you want to play infinity play Infinity, no one is stopping you. I don’t really like infinity (mostly because no one near me plays, same reason I don’t like 9th age or Kings of war) so I’d rather stick with the game system that in my area is not only strong but growing daily. We have so many new AoS peeps it’s awesome. Could stuff be better from jump yes, but if that means sacrificing the break neck pace of new stuff and content constantly being released for the game I’d rather have to deal with a slaanesh army popping up every six months or so. You know where slaanesh was never an issue? My LGS. If someone wanted to play the cheesy version they would ask if anyone wanted a hard game, otherwise they would play something fun with seekers and fiends and not the same copypasta six hero list. If you have a cancerous player who only is willing to play cut throat lists excise him from the community. If you go to a GT guess what your gonna see some stuff. Don’t bring your all infantry deepkin list and be disappointed you went 0 and 5. Bring your all infantry deepkin list and let every opponent know your there to drink and have fun. 

[Forrix]

The spread isn't that bad but I'm truly amazed by how many Infinity factions are sitting within a point or two 50%.

On the OBR/Petririx side of things, I felt they really impact builds. As in they are so incredibly resistant to conventional melee phase attacks that if that's all your bringing you're pretty much SOL. However, if you can bring a substantial amount of mortal wound generation/shooting then you can have an actual game and they aren't that crazy (those catapults are still scary to any low save faction though). Combined with their high meta % they serve as a gatekeeper for list building.

In practice, for me, this means that even though Nurgle Rotbringers have received some major buffs in the Winter FAQ and are getting subfactions in the upcoming expansion unless they get some serious spell casting buffs (or ranged damage somehow) they're still dead to me as a competitive option. OBR (PE with Arkhan) makes up a very high percent of my local meta so unless an army has a substantial shooting component or the ability to spell cast through Arkhan's unbindings there's no way I'm going to bother taking them to a tourney. So basically Nurgle stays on the shelf and I'm working on Cities and Tzeentch (though holding off on the demon side incase GW knee-jerks and nerfs them into oblivion).

[Vakarian]

Indeed they aren't, and I'll keep happily playing both. But the amount of consternation flying around this forum about wildly imbalanced factions (I'm really not sure it's as bad as the initial reports are saying, I'm solidly in the "time well tell, the sky is in fact not falling" camp).

But if GW really wants to try to improve their balance (up to them, what they're doing seems to be working just fine for them as a company), and it seems lots of us hope they will continue to, then CB's method provides some useful lessons.

[Dolomyte]

10 minutes ago, Vakarian said:

Indeed they aren't, and I'll keep happily playing both. But the amount of consternation flying around this forum about wildly imbalanced factions (I'm really not sure it's as bad as the initial reports are saying, I'm solidly in the "time well tell, the sky is in fact not falling" camp).

But if GW really wants to try to improve their balance (up to them, what they're doing seems to be working just fine for them as a company), and it seems lots of us hope they will continue to, then CB's method provides some useful lessons.

I agree it has some interesting elements. I would love to see more interactivity with reporting stuff directly the company beyond the yearly survey. I am also pretty sure the age of Sigmar stat show which the honest war gamer puts out makes its way into their vision. And I think those guys do a really good job for what is essentially a fan project 

[Vakarian]

1 minute ago, Dolomyte said:

I agree it has some interesting elements. I would love to see more interactivity with reporting stuff directly the company beyond the yearly survey. I am also pretty sure the age of Sigmar stat show which the honest war gamer puts out makes its way into their vision. And I think those guys do a really good job for what is essentially a fan project 

I can't agree with this enough. More information (specifically, more detailed information about what units are and aren't taken in lists frequently) would be helpful to them in balanced intra-faction, which might be a bigger balance issue than balance inter-faction in AoS. The Honest Wargamer guys do an incredible job and I hope GW is incorporating their work (other posters have suggested GW does). It would benefit GW to expand on that to include their worldwide player base.

[thediceabide]

This is actually a huge reason I switched to Infinity as my main game years ago, the company invests a lot in making sure their game is balanced and enjoyable, and all of the individual units are viable and worth using. GW of all companies has the resources to do something similar, but they choose not to. Corvus Belli's free army builder, plus into their free tournament software, and then they data mine the heck out of it to balance the game. I'm not sure I'd consider it an easier game to balance, because while the number of rules are finite, there are a ton of them, and each individual model is capable of doing a lot more, activating many times per turn, maneuvering in a wide variety of ways, etc.

Some things @Spears missed in his screen shots is that you actually submit your lists from their army app, to their tournament app, so list submission and validation is built in to the platform. I've never even heard of someone running an illegal list in competition, off by a point, etc., let alone seen it happen in 4 years of playing Infinity competitively, their system simply doesn't allow it. Furthermore, the army builder is considered the source of truth in the game, so you never have the situation where the army builder is incorrect, and even if it is incorrect (like when Druze had AVA2 Peacemakers), it's played as it is in the Army, and considered legal until changed (it's never really been anything drastic).

That said, I still enjoy AoS, but it's a totally different game, and is a ton of fun to do hobby projects for. I can't really take it as seriously though as a competitive game, mostly because GW hasn't really done much in the way of supporting it as one.

Edited January 29, 2020 by thediceabide
I have a potty mouth

[amysrevenge]

15 hours ago, Doko said:

I agree that tournaments players wont be a big chunk from sales but my point is: we have 3 type of clients.

A: collectors,buy models and army that like the lore etc and get every unit from the army to collect it 100%(my case)

B: painters,buy models cool looking to paint

C : tounaments player who buy only the best army and units

I think this entirely misses the largest type.

D : Casual players who like to play games and pick up some models to play, might never get fully painted, might never get beyond 1500-2000 points, might not ever go to a tournament.  (My local AoS league is at least 2/3 type D )