Metawatch article highlighting the total lack of balance

[Greybeard86]

10 hours ago, hobgoblinclub said:

Yes, it's a small sample size.

No, it isn't necessarily a small sample size. If you have large differences you can detect them with "small" sample sizes. Usually that comment is just a smoke screen.

10 hours ago, hobgoblinclub said:

Ultimately, we have a massively skewed meta and, up to now, it's been a deliberate function of GW's game design. It's no accident that Tzeentch smashed 2017, Daughters and Legions smashed 2018, etc. The Design Studio aren't doing this by accident. Ben Johnson is one of the best players out there. He can see what a book is going to do on release. It's no coincidence that the army/armies with a mysterious advantage in the current meta is always the newest one(s). It's a deliberate move to sell new stuff. And I think it's probably fair enough. 

Pretty much, they aren't stupid.

10 hours ago, hobgoblinclub said:

you're a club / home gamer, it's a great game and there's a load of armies around that 'fat middle'.

I firmly believe imbalances make the game unfun for everyone, not only tournament players. Because you might not recognize them as easily as the knowledgeable tournament player, but they still affect your game. There is a reason why most games attempt to have balance.

10 hours ago, hobgoblinclub said:

Last thing, I said earlier that this had been the case 'up to now'. Maybe an article like this, highlighting win ratios, is a sign of a change in the air. Maybe we'll going to get more transparency in future. Maybe GW are actually going to shoot for a balanced meta in future (and if they do, I'll be racing back tournament play). Or maybe they're just desperately trying to keep the competitive players interested while the tourney scene is on hold for Covid. We shall see... 

I think they are straight up getting out in the open the whole concept of "metas". Of course they know what they are doing, but since so many players seem OK with it, why not use it as a sales tool? Here, go buy the new meta thing, buy what is hot now!

[hobgoblinclub]

7 hours ago, Kadeton said:

Since I assume that's aimed at me, I'll respond.

The original claim was "If AoS were a video game, no one would play it given the current imbalance. Can you imagine dota/league/sc2 having the following 'meta':..."

This implies that we're taking DOTA, League and/or SC2 as our model of "good balance", and that they are generally regarded as well-balanced games.

So how are we measuring balance in those games, in order to compare it to AoS? For something like League or DOTA, we'd have to look at something like champion pick/ban rates in major tournaments (we have to work with the statistics we have).

I haven't played League for a long time, so I'm going on reports like Worlds 2020 Champion pick rates, win rates, and bans. Right at the start, they note that balance - in the sense of the variety of champions picked across the competition - was enormously increased over previous years, where only about 10-15 champions had a notable presence. 2020's Worlds had 78 different champions played, so that's pretty good variety, right? Note, however, that League has 151 champions on its roster - almost half of those were not even played once. That's more or less a direct equivalent to "not appearing in this chart"-tier armies like Sylvaneth... except that we might presume Sylvaneth did get played, they just didn't get a top-5 finish. We know for a fact that there were 73 champions not played at all.

We then move very swiftly into some eyebrow-raising stats, such as Ornn and Orianna each having a 91% win rate. Given that AoS players were up in arms about Slaanesh armies when they were sitting around a 65% win rate (and yes, that was a problem!), that seems pretty over the top to me.

So given that we're looking at some champions winning 9 out of 10 games, and that nearly half the champions are considered to be garbage-tier unplayable at the tournament level, I can only see two possible interpretations:

• League is "balanced" in some other sense that can't be directly compared to AoS in a meaningful way; or
• League is way less balanced than AoS.

Which is it? My initial post charitably went with the first, noting that in my opinion they weren't comparable. If people insist they are comparable, then let's have an honest comparison. Explain how a 90% win rate for certain picks represents "good balance", but AoS has "bad balance".

I'm not saying that AoS has good balance. I'm saying that it's remarkably well balanced considering how difficult it is to balance a game like this. If you look through the forums of any of these "well balanced" video games, you'll find hundreds of threads with these same complaints - the balance in the game is terrible, nerf this, buff that, why can't the devs see that such-and-such is OP, etc. Any critical analysis of the highest levels of play will find imbalances that are just as severe, if not way more severe, than the imbalances that exist in AoS.

Basically, GW's chart looks bad on the surface, but actually represents a significant achievement - it's honestly surprising that the balance in AoS is only that bad, and not far worse. In our darkest nightmares, balance in AoS could be as bad as the balance in League of Legends! Imagine Kharadrons sitting at a 90% win rate and literally not even one person playing a Chaos or Death army in any major competition.

Ha! I wasn't aiming at you, sorry. 😄 I was just spouting. 

I think any direct comparison to another game, videogame or tabletop, is going to get stuck in minutiae and unreasonable comparisons. Regardless, it distracts from the point...

The issue is not 'is AoS more or less balanced than X?'. Any discussion on balance should simply be 'is AoS becoming more balanced over time?'  Because, if it isn't, that suggests one of two things:

a) it's accidental, therefore GW don't know how to balance things.

b) it's deliberate, therefore GW aren't even searching for balance.

Either option doesn't really leave us in a great place. 

What do people think? Is it gradually progressing towards balance? From my perspective, it's in very much the same state every year, with GW manipulating the meta pretty effectively. I don't like it but that's what I'm seeing.

[hobgoblinclub]

51 minutes ago, Greybeard86 said:

I have a different interpretation. Balance in GW games matters a lot more because adjusting to a new meta is very costly. Knowing this, they should be extremely conservative with balance decisions. However, they most certainly aren't, with top tier armies and bottom tier switching completely in some cases (knights in 40k, DoK in AoS).

When a video game like LoL or others shake up the meta, it may not necessarily be a bad thing. Having a pool of 150 options and rotating the good ones might not be "bad" if the goal is to have "seasons" of options that are good. It may actually be a design choice.

In GW games a lot of people have "main factions" they like to collect and build up over the span of years. Switching around things is a crappy thing for all of them. And expensive! I do not think GW does a good job at balancing the rules, like at all; in competitive play we see massive changes over the span of months. I do believe it is by design, but it is strictly "bad" for many players.

This. It's pretty unreasonable to expect people  to spend hundreds on an army and a book, only for the rules to change. Not only that, they change within two weeks of release and then continue changing for months / years.

I bought Tzeentch in January 2017 and I thought I was the new greatest player on the scene. Turns out it was just the army was nuts (yes I'm salty as hell 😅).  I went through eighteen months of nerfs (most of which were actually needed) only to be left with a book that wasn't even worth opening and an army that played completely differently from when I bought it. I even started buying and painting the Tzeentch minis I didn't like, just to stay in the meta. 

I'd already given up on tournaments (for now at least) before Covid arrived. I'm planning on playing an army for years (Nurgle) but I'm planning on staying away from the meta altogether so I don't get soured by the wild swings in power.

[hobgoblinclub]

14 minutes ago, Greybeard86 said:

I firmly believe imbalances make the game unfun for everyone, not only tournament players. Because you might not recognize them as easily as the knowledgeable tournament player, but they still affect your game. There is a reason why most games attempt to have balance.

Absolutely. I've thought about tournaments just banning armies that are less that six months old? Maybe even just leaving them home on club nights until they've had time to get their official, inevitable nerf?

 

15 minutes ago, Greybeard86 said:

I think they are straight up getting out in the open the whole concept of "metas". Of course they know what they are doing, but since so many players seem OK with it, why not use it as a sales tool? Here, go buy the new meta thing, buy what is hot now!

Yeah, you might be right. I'd hoped, perhaps naively, that a transparent meta would mean GW having to reign things in a bit. However, the 'broken new hotness' plan seems to sell so well, maybe they've just decided to come clean and show people what to buy if they want to win?

[Tropical Ghost General]

43 minutes ago, hobgoblinclub said:

Absolutely. I've thought about tournaments just banning armies that are less that six months old? Maybe even just leaving them home on club nights until they've had time to get their official, inevitable nerf?

How would you know what needs nerfing if you can't play the army at a competitive level?

This data from GW via AoSShorts is a very small amount, with very little details. Were realms used? Were secondaries used, if so what? Was there other soft scores used? Was it just GHB20 missions or all 18 matched play missions? etc.... 

Iirc the recent 80+ event in Germany had a few armies outside of the top 5, that went 5-0 but lost out due to soft scoring elements. 

But regardless of the data source and how indepth it is, the main issue with the article is how little it offered in terms of actual solutions to the current hotness (shooting) affecting the game. It was basically saying shooting is king, if you don't have shooting try playing eels. 

After failing to be able to finish reading the first 40k article due to it's complete pointlessness and dully written content, I was fortunate enough to not have high hopes for when they did the AoS version. 

[Kadeton]

8 hours ago, Greybeard86 said:

I have a different interpretation. Balance in GW games matters a lot more because adjusting to a new meta is very costly. Knowing this, they should be extremely conservative with balance decisions. However, they most certainly aren't, with top tier armies and bottom tier switching completely in some cases (knights in 40k, DoK in AoS).

When a video game like LoL or others shake up the meta, it may not necessarily be a bad thing. Having a pool of 150 options and rotating the good ones might not be "bad" if the goal is to have "seasons" of options that are good. It may actually be a design choice.

In GW games a lot of people have "main factions" they like to collect and build up over the span of years. Switching around things is a crappy thing for all of them. And expensive! I do not think GW does a good job at balancing the rules, like at all; in competitive play we see massive changes over the span of months. I do believe it is by design, but it is strictly "bad" for many players.

I totally agree. This is one of the reasons I initially went with "these things aren't comparable".

In League, it doesn't matter if the meta churns. People have their favourite champions and don't like to see them nerfed, but ultimately there's basically no opportunity cost to picking a different champion - it's just another button on the selection screen. Playing a different army in AoS is, by comparison, a huge undertaking.

Sadly, churn is the process that makes all of these video games feel "balanced". At no point can you ever snapshot the meta and say "This is well balanced right now." There will always be some champions who are god-tier, and a whole bunch who are unplayable trash. The illusion of "balance" comes from the fact that the state of the game changes quickly and constantly. That kind of "balance" would be a terrible thing for AoS.

So that leaves the designers in a pickle. Actual balance - where all the available options are more or less equally competitive with each other all the time - is so incredibly difficult to achieve that the most "balanced" video games don't even attempt it. The players want balance changes to be immediate and drastic ("OMG Kharadrons are so OP, why haven't they nerfed them already?!") and at the same time conservative and careful ("OMG I just finished putting together a Slaanesh army and now they're worthless, ****** you GW!").

GW could definitely be doing better - anything can be improved. I just think we (as players) have a tendency to imagine that creating balance is simple and obvious, when in reality it's anything but.

7 hours ago, hobgoblinclub said:

The issue is not 'is AoS more or less balanced than X?'. Any discussion on balance should simply be 'is AoS becoming more balanced over time?'  Because, if it isn't, that suggests one of two things:

a) it's accidental, therefore GW don't know how to balance things.

b) it's deliberate, therefore GW aren't even searching for balance.

Either option doesn't really leave us in a great place. 

What do people think? Is it gradually progressing towards balance? From my perspective, it's in very much the same state every year, with GW manipulating the meta pretty effectively. I don't like it but that's what I'm seeing.

Thank you for this. That's a far better question!

I'd say this isn't an either-or proposition. There's clearly some corporate pressure to sell certain models (especially new ones), and it's hard to imagine that this doesn't influence the designers' attempts to balance the game. Capitalism is evil, etc.

However, I've never met a game designer (and I've met quite a few, albeit not any currently working for GW) who would be able to knowingly and deliberately do a "bad job" on game balance. People don't get into that career for the money and fame, they do it because they love and care about designing game systems that work. Corporate forces might be able to convince them to slightly over-tune something for a while, but they'll still try to do the best job they can.

Which brings me to "GW don't know how to balance things." There's obviously an aspect of that - after all, nobody knows how to make a balanced game. It's never been done. Balance is something you approach, not something you achieve. And the closer you get to it, the harder it is to improve without making a mistake that breaks everything. On top of that, the players are demanding that you make changes right now but also extensively playtest them, and that those changes should be both drastic and extremely subtle. No matter what you do, there will be a group of people up in arms at the decisions you've made, using it as evidence that "GW don't know how to balance things."

For what it's worth, I'd say that AoS is becoming more balanced over time. The first edition didn't really attempt balance at all. The second edition was all over the place at launch, but it had at least started to work towards building a competitive mode of play. We're now in a position where GW themselves are openly discussing the concept of meta-analysis and relative performance between the armies in the competitive scene. Those are huge steps in the direction of improving balance.

What that doesn't mean, though, is that we should have any expectation that the next army release should be right in the middle of the pack, and won't have any unintended combos that break the competitive meta, or any glaring deficiencies that make the army unreasonably weak. Or, for that matter, that there won't be a "patch" a few weeks or months after release that will attempt to address those issues. Or that said "patch" will effectively address every balance issue. All of those are, quite simply, unreasonable expectations.

[NinthMusketeer]

I always get a smile out of the old argument 'GW makes new stuff OP so it will sell' made of pure confirmation bias. Nevermind those new armies which come out and perform poorly. Nevermind new models which come out, suck, and remain bad for years on end. Nevermind the huge mass of releases that are not particularly OP or UP.

Or maybe I am wrong and Sons of Behemat will be crushing the meta in short order.

[Eldarain]

Yeah. Far too many releases completely suck for that theory. Seems to be more about having a super fan on the team writing your faction and reportedly not working in concert with one another between projects.

 

Phil Kelly moves to background and Eldar fall from their perch for the first time for many editions...

[NinthMusketeer]

As for the original article, it is solid information. It does a good job explaining what is good and why while being concise about it. But two things sour my opinion of it:

-The initial assertion is phrased as to be very disingenuous. "21 allegiances" overlooks that just 5 make up half of those placings, while 9 make up three quarters of them. Plus the totals of 36 allegiances and ~90 (not sure of the exact count) sub-factions provide some context to that rosy picture they painted. Yeah, I know they need to put a positive spin on things but that statement really undermined the integrity of what was otherwise a pretty honest article.

-They barely mention the elephant in the room: double turn. Getting a double with a shooting army is a far larger advantage than getting it with a melee one. Regardless of if one likes or dislikes it, leaving discussion of the double turn out of the article leaves a big hole in the picture they made no effort to fill.

That said, still impressed by it. Especially with how they managed to convey meaningful advice in just a few paragraphs.

[hobgoblinclub]

10 hours ago, Tropical Ghost General said:

How would you know what needs nerfing if you can't play the army at a competitive level?

This data from GW via AoSShorts is a very small amount, with very little details. Were realms used? Were secondaries used, if so what? Was there other soft scores used? Was it just GHB20 missions or all 18 matched play missions? etc.... 

Iirc the recent 80+ event in Germany had a few armies outside of the top 5, that went 5-0 but lost out due to soft scoring elements. 

But regardless of the data source and how indepth it is, the main issue with the article is how little it offered in terms of actual solutions to the current hotness (shooting) affecting the game. It was basically saying shooting is king, if you don't have shooting try playing eels. 

After failing to be able to finish reading the first 40k article due to it's complete pointlessness and dully written content, I was fortunate enough to not have high hopes for when they did the AoS version. 

You don't really need the data on realms etc. The data is always skewed regardless of what additional rules are bolted on. The results that the Honest Wargamer cover a far greater data set, yet they demonstrate a very similar picture. 

And to answer your first question, you know what needs nerfing because it's new. No, seriously. It's not an accident that the new stuff is broken. Yes, there's the occasional book which is pretty balanced from the start (Beasts of Chaos) but a default ban until each book has hit a big FAQ would sort out many of the issues with the tournament scene / arms race. 

And I'm with you on the article. It was so uninteresting that I only skimmed through the second half. 

Edited October 25, 2020 by hobgoblinclub

[Beastmaster]

11 hours ago, hobgoblinclub said:

Ha! I wasn't aiming at you, sorry. 😄 I was just spouting. 

I think any direct comparison to another game, videogame or tabletop, is going to get stuck in minutiae and unreasonable comparisons. Regardless, it distracts from the point...

The issue is not 'is AoS more or less balanced than X?'. Any discussion on balance should simply be 'is AoS becoming more balanced over time?'  Because, if it isn't, that suggests one of two things:

a) it's accidental, therefore GW don't know how to balance things.

b) it's deliberate, therefore GW aren't even searching for balance.

Either option doesn't really leave us in a great place. 

What do people think? Is it gradually progressing towards balance? From my perspective, it's in very much the same state every year, with GW manipulating the meta pretty effectively. I don't like it but that's what I'm seeing.

I think balancing becomes more and more difficult to achieve with more complexity added. They may try, but the effect gets overridden by a growing number of possibilities to break balance. That’s why there is no true progress.

Also, we see how little is actually necessary to make an army that’s too weak into one that’s too strong and vice versa. See Kharadron. A complex system is an unstable system.

Edited October 25, 2020 by Beastmaster

[El Antiguo Guardián]

I made this video with my analysis of metawatch. It´s just my opinion, not the spanish team or my local team one.

 

 

[Greybeard86]

4 hours ago, Kadeton said:

So that leaves the designers in a pickle. Actual balance - where all the available options are more or less equally competitive with each other all the time - is so incredibly difficult to achieve that the most "balanced" video games don't even attempt it. The players want balance changes to be immediate and drastic ("OMG Kharadrons are so OP, why haven't they nerfed them already?!") and at the same time conservative and careful ("OMG I just finished putting together a Slaanesh army and now they're worthless, ****** you GW!").

GW could definitely be doing better - anything can be improved. I just think we (as players) have a tendency to imagine that creating balance is simple and obvious, when in reality it's anything but.

Thanks for the well reasoned answer. I still fundamentally disagree, though.

i see very often assertions like “perfect balance is boring” or “with so many factions you cannot balance”. I have some counters:

•  9th age is now more balanced, in terms of tourney outcomes, than WHFB or AoS have ever been. 
• AoS seems, ever since the “second launch”, to be permanently in a similar level of imbalance, with top armies capping at around 70% wins, and supported bottom armies with at least around high 30%. The name tags change, the results are similar. 
• The moment a new book arrives competitive players can tell, almost immediately, whether it will be strong or not. The combos are not that hard to spot, there aren’t that many deep rule interactions. 

Given all this, I am quite convinced that the meta shaking is by design. That GW uses this both in 40k and AoS as a way to “keep the game fresh”, much like video games do.  But with the added bonus that this encourages players to switch armies and buy new sculpts. It is not a conspiracy theory, in the sense that you don’t need to stretch reality to make this fit, and it is very well aligned with GW s main motivation of selling models. 
 

I think this warcom article is GW embracing the meta seasons approach. Neither player nor interviewer ever discuss the fact that there is such a meta as a bad thing or that GW will try to address it. They limit themselves to discussing what are current strong options. You want a current strong option? Here we give you the menu and how to build them. But then, don’t get too attached, because things will change again. 
 

This sort of imbalanced meta seasons will continue for as long as GW has the market power to enforce it. There aren’t that many obvious alternatives to their rules, specially with the all around mainstream package they provide (support, recognizability). I have seen people quit wargaming because of legends shenanigans or big meta switches because they thing there isn’t a true alternative. 
 

I do understand that lots of hobby oriented individuals are happy to show off their creations to a large audience (darned by the gaming side). And that players like being able to find others to play  with(as opposed to having to look for deep geeks who may know about that very specific game system). I think that’s how they keep a bulk of happy costumers, even with all the rule butchering they do, or the astonishingly high prices. There are ways to work around the BS, with second hand models and what not, but it still irks me to see the commercial side messing so much with the development of a better game.

 

[JPjr]

I feel like people are overblowing the importance of this article when really isn't it just GW trying to be nice and throw a bone to the 1% of people in this hobby who play competitively and have to wake up every day burdened with the knowledge that they're playing the game wrong.

[Saxon]

1 hour ago, Greybeard86 said:

This sort of imbalanced meta seasons will continue for as long as GW has the market power to enforce it. There aren’t that many obvious alternatives to their rules, specially with the all around mainstream package they provide (support, recognizability). I have seen people quit wargaming because of legends shenanigans or big meta switches because they thing there isn’t a true alternative. 

Isn't this an indication of either a) accidental poor rule writing and play testing or b) purposeful poor rule writing? 

I see nerfs as an admission that their new rules interact poorly with existing ones. 

Its extremely poor for a leading company to make books useless within several months. 

[Pitloze]

Ever since the crisis paper Magic The Gathering has practically died off and went digital you can tell Wizards has been a lot faster with banning and balancing cards. Warhammer has the same problem. Balancing around paper is really hard. By the time one book is out and balanced it almost automatically pushes other books down. Powercreep is just harder to deal with when you are tied to analog.

A lot of ways to deal with this problem would negatively impact the relevancy of battletomes. And thus drive down sales. So it won't happen.

Maybe the only possible way that could both make GW money and actively smooths out a meta is a GHB that actually matters. If you're gonna release that once a year also  work on it for a year. By the time summer comes around you really should have a good idea of what you want.

Edited October 25, 2020 by Pitloze

[Greybeard86]

1 hour ago, Saxon said:

Isn't this an indication of either a) accidental poor rule writing and play testing or b) purposeful poor rule writing? 

I see nerfs as an admission that their new rules interact poorly with existing ones. 

Its extremely poor for a leading company to make books useless within several months. 

It is most certainly a deliberate choice. I'll give you some examples from 40k which give it away (these are community accepted examples):

1. Aggressors vs assault centurions: towards the end of 8th edition, the 40k competitive scene was dominated by Raven Guard assault centurion spam (slow units that have high volume of fire and punch well in melee). When 9th came, assault centurions were nerfed to the ground (point costs), and then aggressors were undercosted and started showing up everywhere. Aggressors are the primaris version of assault centurions (they fulfill the exact same role). Aggressors were very strong due to their ability to double shot. Then, a few months later, aggressor double shooting is taken away, which is a massive change. It simply overshadowed any of the new powerful models GW is introducing for primaris marines (heavy intercessors).
2. Wulfen vs thunderwolf cavalry: both units are hard hitting mobile assault units from the Space Wolves marines. In 8th edition, thunderwolves were considered to be very bad units. Wulfen, on the other hand, saw some more use. To a large extent, this was due to their ability to: i) advance and charge, ii) fight on death. 9th edition comes, and wulfen lose fight on death and advance and charge. Guess who gained advance and charge (and other benefits)? Yes, you guessed correctly, thunderwolf cavarly. Now wulfen are considered bad and thunderwolves good.
3. Custodes wardens vs terminators: custodes wardens were the best point per point infantry unit custodes could field; they massively overshadowed the terminators due to high number of quality attacks, good resilience, utility, and being very point efficient; point per point, it was better to bring wardens than terminators. 9th edition comes and terminators get both point reductions and a lot of strategem support. Now, wardens are strictly dominated by allarus terminators in the vast majority of situations.

So, this is not unexpected, or some weird rule interaction. Anyone can see that they decided to switch the units they favored. They simply made some better, and some worse. But they made sure that what they made better was without a doubt superior than what they made worse. In other words, they did not move towards more balance, they purposely kept things as imbalanced as before, but switched around what units were the "best" options. And I expect them to do the same in a few months, again.

There is, without much doubt, a deliberate effort by GW to switch around what armies are better and, within armies, the units that are better. There is little to no sublety in the way this is done. So why is GW doing this? Why aren't they balancing wulfen and thunderwolf cavalry to be both viable? Because they stand to benefit from a switching meta. People will gravitate to powerful options, and away from weak ones. When a new player asks for advise on a list the first thing he gets are the meta choices. But we now know those won't stay always relevant, so the player will either accept being "weaker" in an obvious manner, or get the new "meta" units. And then the meta army will change altogether.

Obviously, some people don't care about the performance in game. But even hobby oriented people enjoy getting attention, likes, visits. So they will paint things that are being talked about. New things, and units that warcom and the GW machinery brings to the front with revised sculpts, new rules, and so on. It is all part of a very obvious plan to boost sales, and it freaking works.

 

Edited October 25, 2020 by Greybeard86

[Saxon]

2 minutes ago, Greybeard86 said:

There is, without much doubt, a deliberate effort by GW to switch around what armies are better and, within armies, the units that are better. There is little to no sublety in the way this is done. So why is GW doing this? Why aren't they balancing wulfen and thunderwolf cavalry to be both viable? Because they stand to benefit from a switching meta. People will gravitate to powerful options, and away from weak ones. When a new player asks for advise on a list the first thing he gets are the meta choices. But we now know those won't stay always relevant, so the player will either accept being "weaker" in an obvious manner, or get the new "meta" units. And then the meta army will change altogether.

Whilst im not super familiar with 40k i have seen a lot of references to these sorts of things. The interesting question is why? 

Is it to make people chase the meta and thus buy more models at the expense of the rest of their customers? Do WAAC players outspend the rest of us? 

I see a lot of contempt for arguments that suggest that rules that create a negative reaction from the community are intentional on the basis that not every new set of rules is broken. 

[Greybeard86]

16 minutes ago, Saxon said:

The interesting question is why? 

Is it to make people chase the meta and thus buy more models at the expense of the rest of their customers? Do WAAC players outspend the rest of us? 

It is not only the rules, it is the attention they generate. As I said, if you are painting (maybe even have a commission service), you'll likely get more attention if you focus on models that are taking the spotlight. Recently warcom featured a selection of the new void necro models (very powerful IG, btw), showing what "elite painters" crafted. That's big publicity for the people featured.

GW is a big company and they make a deliberate effort to sell you models, attacking from all fronts. It is not just WAAC people they target, they have tricks to get to all of us.

Quote

I see a lot of contempt for arguments that suggest that rules that create a negative reaction from the community are intentional on the basis that not every new set of rules is broken. 

That's a silly thing people say to disprove the obvious. Not absolutely all new releases are broken OP, and they do not need to be. The model is based on switching the spotlight to a few choices at a time to boost their sales; sometimes they bring to relevance old sculpts / armies. That said, an analysis of new releases will show that the majority place "strongly".

Edited October 25, 2020 by Greybeard86

[Saxon]

2 minutes ago, Greybeard86 said:

It is not only the rules, it is the attention they generate. As I said, if you are painting (maybe even have a commission service), you'll likely get more attention if you focus on models that are taking the spotlight. Recently warcom featured a selection of the new void necro models (very powerful IG, btw), showing what "elite painters" crafted. That's big publicity for the people featured.

GW is a big company and they make a deliberate effort to sell you models, attacking from all fronts. It is not just WAAC people they target, they have tricks to get to all of us.

Indeed. The new space marine sculpts are absolutely terrible. They look like multiple kits frankensteined together. But give space marines stupid rules and now these things are viable. I saw on instagram some hate for some of the melta rules that are just off the charts. 

I must be broken because in the last 12 months GW has made it almost impossible to sell me new models. In 12 months I've purchased 1 box of models to finalise my nighthaunt. Whilst I didn't mind some of the newer models, you see the buzz online about how great they are and like clockwork the inevitable rage when their singular builds get the nerf stick. 

I think I'm traumatised by how quickly LoN became virtually unplayable when I spent the best part of a year building an army. 

[Greybeard86]

13 minutes ago, Saxon said:

 you see the buzz online about how great they are and like clockwork the inevitable rage when their singular builds get the nerf stick. 

I think I'm traumatised by how quickly LoN became virtually unplayable when I spent the best part of a year building an army. 

By design. They use hypetrains to sell, and nerfs to keep it going.

Look, LoN are great, fantastic sculpts, updated rules! Hype hype hype! Until it is time for SoB, which are great, new sculpts, new rules! Hype hype hype.

And round and round goes the wheel.

[Boar]

12 hours ago, Kadeton said:

I'd say this isn't an either-or proposition. There's clearly some corporate pressure to sell certain models (especially new ones), and it's hard to imagine that this doesn't influence the designers' attempts to balance the game. Capitalism is evil, etc.

However, I've never met a game designer (and I've met quite a few, albeit not any currently working for GW) who would be able to knowingly and deliberately do a "bad job" on game balance. People don't get into that career for the money and fame, they do it because they love and care about designing game systems that work. Corporate forces might be able to convince them to slightly over-tune something for a while, but they'll still try to do the best job they can.

 Funnily if GW corporate wants to put pressure on buying new models, we can see they are not doing the best job with f.ex Flamers, Salamanders and Marauders😜

There is important question of whether deisgn team even has enough resources, both in time and manpower. When discussing role of managment of company in regards to design process, I guess it could very well be not high enough priority from them on polishing rules ie. on resources of company invested into this process.

This leads me to fact that people like to criticise game developers and rules writers, but are those designers given fair chance by their circumstances? When you have certain amount of experience working, unless you are lucky, you will sooner, rather than later have to deal with managment with giant expectations and not enough support for you as a worker that has to actually achieve all of those goals. And when tasks are not completed to satisfaction of either managment or clients, you will be chosen to shoulder the blame. So before any of you guys start going of on design team, stop for a moment.

 

 

[NinthMusketeer]

I have an honest question for those who believe this is all intentional by GW:

Theoretically speaking, if the shifting meta was actually NOT intentional, the crazy balance shifts simply due to some combination of apathy and ineptitude, how would you know? What would you expect to see if this were all unintentional, or at least due to intentional disregard?

[EnixLHQ]

It doesn't really matter which way you cut the data, or if you add in more or data or not, when what matters most is how it impacts you when you're at the table yourself.

Everyone wants to play what they love. For some people that's the new hotness. For the rest of us it's the army that got us into the game or the one you stumbled on that really stuck with you.

We honestly only really care when we put that army on the table and see it erased 4 out of 5 times you play it. This is what needs to be fixed. Argue about balance all you want, what we really want is to be able to have fun with the army we love.

GW can accomplish this and still sell models, but I'm willing to bet that they won't give that an honest effort until it impacts their bottom line. They'll release new armies until we either don't care anymore or they reach whatever end of the line they have dreamed up, at which point they'll go back and cash in on the nostalgia wagon.

[Greybeard86]

19 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

I have an honest question for those who believe this is all intentional by GW:

Theoretically speaking, if the shifting meta was actually NOT intentional, the crazy balance shifts simply due to some combination of apathy and ineptitude, how would you know? What would you expect to see if this were all unintentional, or at least due to intentional disregard?

I already highlighted some changes that are obviously intentional in my other post. Straight up swaping the key abilities between two units, one considered bad and the other decent, is only going to lead to one clear outcome. That is, the bad unit will become good, and the good unit bad. That is not balance, at all, and I do not think anyone would believe that in that scenario the game is better. Again, I used examples that are very commonly accepted in the community. Go to any 40k player and ask them about those units.

This is not a matter of having lots of time to think it through: most of the new imbalances can be spotted within hours of the release of a new rules book. The majority of the time they aren't obscure rule interactions, they are straight up buffs or nerfs with straightforward consequences.

I think that saying it is incompetence is just letting GW get away with it; it is straight up planned, and I am sure that perusing through changes in recent years we could find even more obvious answers. The rule writers work in a company attempting to maximize sales, same as video game designers. Whether their strategies work on us is, to an extent, up to how we react to the changes.