Metawatch article highlighting the total lack of balance

[Saxon]

2 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

To summarize: GW, please stop f-ing up army books by making them trash-tier or god tier.  Playtest more, listen to the testers and make every army simple middle-tier. Thx.

Also, stop f-ing up the prices, really, just stop.

We should write an open letter as the TGA Community, this might have an effect eventually

Haha thanks for the summary 😆

[123lac]

13 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

To summarize: GW, please stop f-ing up army books by making them trash-tier or god tier.  Playtest more, listen to the testers and make every army simple middle-tier. Thx.

Also, stop f-ing up the prices, really, just stop.

We should write an open letter as the TGA Community, this might have an effect eventually

Pretty much.

In terms of balance, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to be capable of having a meta where the lowest armies sit at 45% win rate and the top tier armies sit at 55% win rate.

I mean compare any of the top tier factions to Beasts of Chaos. It's just too unfair to those who are invested in the bottom tier factions.

[JackStreicher]

It is.

At this point we should make GW aware, that these issues are problematic to us. so I wonder if an open letter could be made 🤔

@Overread any idea how to handle writing an open letter to gw as the TGA Community.

[Kadeton]

1 minute ago, Saxon said:

This is a company that has existed for 4 decades, they should have a process sorted by now to address these issues and they should have enough data to know what does and doesn't work. Perhaps they haven't learnt anything?

I'd say the opposite. They've learned exactly how much effort to put into their releases in order to minimise their overheads while still satisfying their customers. There's literally no reason (beyond personal pride on the part of the developers - but again, they don't make these business decisions) to put in more effort than that. If people are happy to buy armies with wonky balance going on four decades, then clearly people just don't care enough about balance to look elsewhere.

1 minute ago, Saxon said:

I would agree that its likely difficult given that designers probably don't choose release dates and thus their testing phase must fit into whatever the marketing guys allow them but these constant hard nerfs and printing sheets which address their changes through errata  isn't great when they charge $70AUD for a battletome and $40AUD for warscroll cards. Worse still is armies going from competitive to garbage by the time you've finished painting the models (Legions of Nagash being a good example). I've seen many arguments on this site that GW only sells models and thus supporting armies through rules updates etc. is not their problem. I couldn't disagree more. Without rules GW products are just really expensive models. Support is what has put GW above competitors for a long time.

If they charge too much for you to be happy with the quality of the products they produce, then just stop buying their products. Support their competitors instead! I stopped buying GW stuff ages ago, because their prices are way too high for me to get a sense of value from them.

My point, overall, is that getting mad at GW for the quality of their products, or at their designers for not somehow managing to produce perfect rules in the limited time GW allows them, is a fundamentally pointless stance when GW are still posting record profits. You and I can say they should do better, but why should they listen?

1 minute ago, Saxon said:

I would love to know how many practice games the final Slaanesh, Tzeentch and OBR versions got because these factions have been nerfed really hard. You only have to look at the sub-forum for OBR on here to see the discontent with the revised rules. Is this an acceptable outcome for GW to upset a lot of players by gutting their army they likely haven't even finished painting?

Is it an acceptable outcome? Apparently! Tons of people are still buying GW models.

1 minute ago, Saxon said:

Not getting a free pass means they don't get to brush it off as a mistake or human error like you were happy to throw out there. The only way GW gets better at making rules and balancing their games is feedback from people who wont make excuses for them all the time.

I make "excuses" for the designers, because most of the commenters here have absolutely no idea of the challenges of balancing a complex game. People call them lazy, incompetent, malicious, and so on all the time. I think that's totally unfair. They're just people doing their best under the circumstances.

I don't make any excuses for GW as a corporate entity, because I think their business practices harm their games and the community. But that doesn't mean I can ignore the fact that vast numbers of people around the world are queuing up to throw money at them, and that they have absolutely no reason to behave differently until those people stop doing that.

1 minute ago, Saxon said:

Not that my experience in testing anything should really matter byut funnily enough in my field of work i actually did the field testing for moving soil profiling onto a tablet form. It took time but we can't use a sub-standard product because our clients are less forgiving than a lot of GW customers i guess......

I honestly wish that GW customers would be less forgiving. I just don't think there's any point in railing at GW about it when they're unable to hear you over the roaring river of cash flowing into Nottingham, and I hate it when people go off at games designers. I just support other companies instead.

[Saxon]

Just now, 123lac said:

Pretty much.

In terms of balance, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to be capable of having a meta where the lowest armies sit at 45% win rate and the top tier armies sit at 55% win rate.

I mean compare any of the top tier factions to Beasts of Chaos. It's just too unfair to those who are invested in the bottom tier factions.

My question for people who have no issues with the current state of balance would be how do you expect to convince someone who invested into an army like Beasts of Chaos to invest into a new army and continue to buy models? I can't see them getting a revamp for quite some time. Are you likely to have many fun games with such an uncompetitive army? I'd wager most people at least like to feel like they have a chance in each game they play. 

[Saxon]

1 minute ago, Kadeton said:

I'd say the opposite. They've learned exactly how much effort to put into their releases in order to minimise their overheads while still satisfying their customers. There's literally no reason (beyond personal pride on the part of the developers - but again, they don't make these business decisions) to put in more effort than that. If people are happy to buy armies with wonky balance going on four decades, then clearly people just don't care enough about balance to look elsewhere.

If they charge too much for you to be happy with the quality of the products they produce, then just stop buying their products. Support their competitors instead! I stopped buying GW stuff ages ago, because their prices are way too high for me to get a sense of value from them.

My point, overall, is that getting mad at GW for the quality of their products, or at their designers for not somehow managing to produce perfect rules in the limited time GW allows them, is a fundamentally pointless stance when GW are still posting record profits. You and I can say they should do better, but why should they listen?

Is it an acceptable outcome? Apparently! Tons of people are still buying GW models.

I make "excuses" for the designers, because most of the commenters here have absolutely no idea of the challenges of balancing a complex game. People call them lazy, incompetent, malicious, and so on all the time. I think that's totally unfair. They're just people doing their best under the circumstances.

I don't make any excuses for GW as a corporate entity, because I think their business practices harm their games and the community. But that doesn't mean I can ignore the fact that vast numbers of people around the world are queuing up to throw money at them, and that they have absolutely no reason to behave differently until those people stop doing that.

I honestly wish that GW customers would be less forgiving. I just don't think there's any point in railing at GW about it when they're unable to hear you over the roaring river of cash flowing into Nottingham, and I hate it when people go off at games designers. I just support other companies instead.

It's funny but i used to work for a company with similar beliefs. They made a fortune off the back of the mining boom here in Australia and were happy to ignore the negative noise on the basis that they were making a fortune and therefore as you say; enough people were happy to keep throwing money at them so why bother doing anything they didn't have to? I left about 2 years later. These days, they're massively struggling because they reached almost like a critical mass point where their business practices upset enough people for the negativity to get around to their loyal customers and their market share tanked hard. 

I feel like GW is going to reach this point eventually without change. It seems to have been close to this with 40k because from all reports they've actually worked really hard to address a lot of their problems. Would they be willing to put the effort into AoS given that comparatively its very new? Who knows. I too am aware that a massive shift away from GW has been predicted millions of times in GW's operating history and has never happened. 

As to whether or not they listen to me, i've voted with my money and scaled my investment into their models back by a lot. I've purchased 1 box of GW models this year whereas i have scaled up my investment into Warlord Games Bolt Action. I also got into warcry buying second hand models/sets. 

I feel like i should clarify my position in that i don't necessarily put the blame onto the designers so to speak, but GW as a whole entity. As you previously suggested and i fully agree, the designers likely don't get to choose their timelines for releases. They would do the best they can with the time they have. I instead put my blame onto GW as a corporation for allowing unbalanced rules to come out and not allowing the designers and testers enough resources to get it right (as far as practically possible). I don't expect perfection. But i also don't expect scenarios like Beasts of Chaos and Legions of Nagash to happen either from a high-level company. 

[JackStreicher]

2 minutes ago, Saxon said:

I don't expect perfection. But i also don't expect scenarios like Beasts of Chaos and Legions of Nagash to happen either from a high-level company. 

 Very well put

[Kadeton]

52 minutes ago, Saxon said:

It's funny but i used to work for a company with similar beliefs. They made a fortune off the back of the mining boom here in Australia and were happy to ignore the negative noise on the basis that they were making a fortune and therefore as you say; enough people were happy to keep throwing money at them so why bother doing anything they didn't have to? I left about 2 years later. These days, they're massively struggling because they reached almost like a critical mass point where their business practices upset enough people for the negativity to get around to their loyal customers and their market share tanked hard. 

I feel like GW is going to reach this point eventually without change.

Probably. Hopefully, even? Either they'll see what's coming and adjust, or (if they either don't see it or choose to ignore it) they'll quite rightly go bust. It would be an excellent wake-up call for the company.

Quote

It seems to have been close to this with 40k because from all reports they've actually worked really hard to address a lot of their problems. Would they be willing to put the effort into AoS given that comparatively its very new? Who knows. I too am aware that a massive shift away from GW has been predicted millions of times in GW's operating history and has never happened.

FWIW, I think AoS is in a much better place than 40K. It has a better core system, better gameplay, better variety, and much better balance. The only thing it doesn't have is vast quantities of established lore that has fascinated and engaged people for decades. For some reason, when I say things like that, people sometimes take it to mean that I think AoS is perfect and doesn't need any improvement? What I really mean, I guess, is AoS has its problems but Jesus Christ, look at how bad it could have been.

And yeah, sadly people have been predicting the imminent death of GW as a result of their poor quality rules for the 25+ years I've been in the hobby, and presumably before that too. These conversations have literally never stopped.

That said, I think GW have actually shifted significantly over the years towards better rules and a more stable competitive meta. It's just that those changes have always happened far more slowly than players are happy with, and in some cases more slowly than anyone really notices at the time. It's only by looking back into the grim darkness of the distant past that we can see how far we've actually come... and how much further there still is to go.

Quote

As to whether or not they listen to me, i've voted with my money and scaled my investment into their models back by a lot. I've purchased 1 box of GW models this year whereas i have scaled up my investment into Warlord Games Bolt Action. I also got into warcry buying second hand models/sets.

Nice. This is basically all any of us can do, I think - vote with our wallets and our hobby time, and encourage others to do the same.

Quote

I feel like i should clarify my position in that i don't necessarily put the blame onto the designers so to speak, but GW as a whole entity. As you previously suggested and i fully agree, the designers likely don't get to choose their timelines for releases. They would do the best they can with the time they have. I instead put my blame onto GW as a corporation for allowing unbalanced rules to come out and not allowing the designers and testers enough resources to get it right (as far as practically possible). I don't expect perfection. But i also don't expect scenarios like Beasts of Chaos and Legions of Nagash to happen either from a high-level company. 

I guess for me it's less a case of "GW should never have let Beasts of Chaos happen!" and more a matter of "When something like Beasts of Chaos happens, how do we make sure that GW knows it's a serious problem?" Bad things can always happen - as you mentioned earlier, mines collapse and people die. The courts aren't there to prevent mines from collapsing. What they do is ensure that the companies responsible face financial penalties that are (hopefully) severe enough that it's in the company's best financial interest to do everything they can to try to avoid a collapse. If there are insufficient penalties (as unfortunately seems to be the case in some parts of the world) then there's no corporate incentive to prevent disasters, and bad things will happen all the time.

So calling it out on forums, writing letters, and other forms of non-financial protest has zero effect on GW (but, IMO, has a generally negative effect on the player community, and should therefore be avoided). There's only one way to meaningfully hurt a company enough for them to address a problem: impact the bottom line, again and again, as much as possible.

Edited October 26, 2020 by Kadeton

[Greybeard86]

7 hours ago, Kadeton said:

The designers at GW aren't Machiavellian manipulators expertly milking the unsuspecting public for every last cent, and they're not drooling half-wits bashing randomly at keyboards.

GW designers are employees in a large company owned by investment funds, much like game designers in the video game industry. None of my comments are directed at them because those decisions are not up to them.

6 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

If GW is making new stuff OP to sell it, why are the majority of new model kits not OP?

If GW is switching what's good and bad to promote sales, why are so many good things staying good and so many bad things still bad?

What I said is that GW is, on purpose, altering frequently the state of the meta to promote sales. They do that both within and across armies. For that to happen, you need imbalance within and across books, and you need it to hold enough to entice people to buy. Which is exactly what I am seeing; for example: when I first looked into AoS some years ago the faction DoK was dominating the meta, and now I see that they seem to have fallen off the top positions. KO appears to have gone through a rollercoaster too, further reinforcing the idea that power levels are cyclical.

Saying that I claimed that every new model needs to be OP to sell it is setting up a strawman to beat. The internal imbalance within the new lumineth book is entirely consitent with this story. Want a prediction? Within a few years, the "good" units of the Lumineth book will have changed.

5 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

KO is an extremely prominent example [...]Why did GW make a whole new line of miniatures bad for so long?

It is my understanding that KO were terrible for a while, but they weren't ALWAYS as bad, were they?

2 hours ago, Kramer said:

I’m trying to open up the possibility that your wrong.  At least here in the Netherlands we have a difference between murder and manslaughter. And the fact that I instantly knew these terms I’m pretty sure the UK has as well. 

intent matters. And if you claim to know why GW does things. You better back it up. Rather than just say the community accepts it. 

And again the same thing. In a court of law no one would ever say: "but you weren't there, so you cannot know for sure, right? ", which is what you are repeating time and again. You stack evidence and you provide a reasonable story that ties it together within your explanation of the events. This is exactly what we are doing here; shall we get back to it?

When I said that "the community accepts it", I referred to clear cases of units that were straight up swapped in power levels across editions. They went from good to bad, and viceversa, and it was kindergarden obvious why that happened, not so unexpected rule interaction. If you go and ask 40k players, they'll say yeah now this unit sucks, and that one was bad and is now good; they won't necessarily engage in the sort of discussion were are having here.

2 hours ago, Kramer said:

But that’s how conspiracy theories start and maintain themselves. Creating an echo chamber for the suspicions, a whole lot of conversation bias, and the filter bubble (on a bigger scale at least) doesn’t help.

That is not in good faith, so I won't further respond to it.

2 hours ago, Kadeton said:

A "free pass" for getting out of what, exactly? Are you proposing to punish them in some way?

Acknowledging it is important. Much like it is important to recognize marketing tricks to remain rational in purchase decisions. The way we, as consumers, approach the game and the company is not the same under the two scenarios.

If they truly want a balanced game, but somehow failed at doing it, then our best strategy is to show them how we are assessing balance (tourney results, unit analysis), and hope that helps them better hit the target. If they are switching metas on purpose, then we need to think whether we want a competitive scene dominated by marketing ploys, or we want to somehow isolate it from them (e.g. tournament rules packs to correct for blatant imbalances). And so on.

2 hours ago, Kadeton said:

The simple fact is that if balance mattered beyond "good enough", those cheaper games with better balance would be the ones dominating the market, and GW would go out of business. The fact that they are doing better than ever demonstrates that they have captured a substantial market for whom the quality of their game rules is "good enough". So what's the business incentive to throw more resources at development? To increase the demand that they already can't supply? To appease a handful of players bitching on internet forums? GW don't owe you anything.

You are aware, though, that large dominant companies engage in lots of strategies aimed at keeping that dominance while not necessarily being the best? Why do you think windows worked so hard to be included in every new computer? Why do you thin google is introduced as the default in so many phones? When a company has market power, they engage want to keep it (it is good for profits, though bad for consumers), and they will do plenty to make it so.

All that to say that current GW being THE dominant company does not necessarily mean that they are the best company or the best game, or even the one that people would prefer. Much like windows was not necessarily the best OS.

1 hour ago, Kadeton said:

I make "excuses" for the designers, because most of the commenters here have absolutely no idea of the challenges of balancing a complex game. People call them lazy, incompetent, malicious, and so on all the time. I think that's totally unfair. They're just people doing their best under the circumstances.

I don't make any excuses for GW as a corporate entity, because I think their business practices harm their games and the community. But that doesn't mean I can ignore the fact that vast numbers of people around the world are queuing up to throw money at them, and that they have absolutely no reason to behave differently until those people stop doing that.

There is no "game designers" and then "GW corporate entity". They are not to separate things, there are game designers working for GW corporate entity. You don't need to make "excuses" for designers because no one is saying they are malicious, or even bad at their jobs. It is just you fighting that battle, I bet the majority of us have a lot of sympathy for the game designers, or the mini designers.

[Kasper]

I dont know if this is something new or if they have done it in the past - Im curious if it is a sign of them going to focus more on balance and stats than they have previously. Unfortunately not everything can be solved by adding 10 pts increases to a range of models, they have to adress tons of things like certain armies having a "free" one drop army. It is absolutely beyond me how Changehost could be printed in the first place. It costs almost nothing, it gives an utterly insane bonus (2 teleports pre nerf???), there is no "unit tax" to fulfill the requirement of the batallion and there is no real limit to it either. It is a no-brainer to pick and frankly to have a teleport PLUS a one drop army means the batallion should easily cost a lot more or have a serious unit tax like forcing you to pick some ****** unit to fulfill requirements.

KO getting a 10-15% pts increase across the board is not gonna stop them from giving you the first turn and removing your entire army if they win the double turn.

Edited October 26, 2020 by Kasper

[Feii]

1 hour ago, Saxon said:

It's funny but i used to work for a company with similar beliefs. They made a fortune off the back of the mining boom here in Australia and were happy to ignore the negative noise on the basis that they were making a fortune and therefore as you say; enough people were happy to keep throwing money at them so why bother doing anything they didn't have to? I left about 2 years later. These days, they're massively struggling because they reached almost like a critical mass point where their business practices upset enough people for the negativity to get around to their loyal customers and their market share tanked hard. 

I feel like GW is going to reach this point eventually without change. It seems to have been close to this with 40k because from all reports they've actually worked really hard to address a lot of their problems. Would they be willing to put the effort into AoS given that comparatively its very new? Who knows. I too am aware that a massive shift away from GW has been predicted millions of times in GW's operating history and has never happened. 

As to whether or not they listen to me, i've voted with my money and scaled my investment into their models back by a lot. I've purchased 1 box of GW models this year whereas i have scaled up my investment into Warlord Games Bolt Action. I also got into warcry buying second hand models/sets. 

I feel like i should clarify my position in that i don't necessarily put the blame onto the designers so to speak, but GW as a whole entity. As you previously suggested and i fully agree, the designers likely don't get to choose their timelines for releases. They would do the best they can with the time they have. I instead put my blame onto GW as a corporation for allowing unbalanced rules to come out and not allowing the designers and testers enough resources to get it right (as far as practically possible). I don't expect perfection. But i also don't expect scenarios like Beasts of Chaos and Legions of Nagash to happen either from a high-level company. 

Please just stop using the word investment like that. Plastic soldiers are not stock markets. 

[Saxon]

1 minute ago, Feii said:

Please just stop using the word investment like that. Plastic soldiers are not stock markets. 

Plastic soldiers are an investment of money and time. The return on investment is happiness in one of the steps of the hobby be it building/modelling/painting or gaming or any combination of the above. 

[Feii]

4 minutes ago, Saxon said:

Plastic soldiers are an investment of money and time. The return on investment is happiness in one of the steps of the hobby be it building/modelling/painting or gaming or any combination of the above. 

You are lying to yourself by using the corporate language to justify your hobby and having a good time. You don't need to do that and reduce your primary motivation into the realm of  efficiency. 

[Saxon]

2 minutes ago, Feii said:

You are lying to yourself by using the corporate language to justify your hobby and having a good time. You don't need to do that and reduce your primary motivation into the realm of  efficiency. 

Amazing that someone I've never met knows more about myself than I do.....

I used an example of a company in a topic about the company and its business practices? Im sorry but I really cannot understand what the issue is? 

[Feii]

2 minutes ago, Saxon said:

Amazing that someone I've never met knows more  than I do.....

 

Yeah you are right 😎

[Beliman]

KOs on the top as it always should have been.
ALL HAIL THE TRUE OVERLORDS!!!

[Kadeton]

56 minutes ago, Greybeard86 said:

If they truly want a balanced game, but somehow failed at doing it, then our best strategy is to show them how we are assessing balance (tourney results, unit analysis), and hope that helps them better hit the target. If they are switching metas on purpose, then we need to think whether we want a competitive scene dominated by marketing ploys, or we want to somehow isolate it from them (e.g. tournament rules packs to correct for blatant imbalances). And so on.

I actually don't see the need for knowledge of GW's intentions there. The essential question is "Do we want a competitive scene which uses GW's rules as-is, or do we want to alter them ourselves?" Who cares why GW isn't writing the rules the way you want - if you don't like them, it's better to focus on what you can do about it, not why it's happening.

Quote

You don't need to make "excuses" for designers because no one is saying they are malicious, or even bad at their jobs. It is just you fighting that battle, I bet the majority of us have a lot of sympathy for the game designers, or the mini designers.

Um... a bunch of people have been saying exactly that, in this thread. Sure, those people might be accidentally conflating GW and GW's design team as being one and the same, but that's a distinction that I think is important enough to call out whenever people make that mistake. Whenever people ask "Why don't the designers just write better rules/fix imbalances/do the obvious thing?" the answer should always be "Because GW doesn't enable them to," and not any other reason.

Edited October 26, 2020 by Kadeton

[Saxon]

5 minutes ago, Kadeton said:

Whenever people ask "Why don't the designers just write better rules/fix imbalances/do the obvious thing?" the answer should always be "Because GW doesn't enable them to," and not any other reason.

Not always true. Someone had to come up with the rules for Lord Kroak. Kroak has to be one of the most unfun models to play against to have ever been created. 

[Overread]

3 hours ago, JackStreicher said:

It is.

At this point we should make GW aware, that these issues are problematic to us. so I wonder if an open letter could be made 🤔

@Overread any idea how to handle writing an open letter to gw as the TGA Community.

Honestly I've no idea. Plus do you even have the capacity to speak for all of TGA? You'd have to devise a series of bulletpoints to summarise your views and then get an open thread for people to "sign" in agreement to those general points. After that you'd have to consider if you'd have enough votes to make it have any weight. A 100 names on a forum is honestly nothing to GW in terms of marketing.

Instead you'd likely want to collect together viewpoints from a far larger segment of the population.

 

It can be done, but it would take a lot of organising and legwork and even then you will likely only be able to achieve a general "please improve balance" type of commentary. More detail can be done, but unless you've a working understanding of how GW operates it becomes harder to suggest fixes that are specific to GW and relevant. On top of that the more detailed any proposal is the harder it will be to unite people behind it without it being pulled apart by bit picking/personal agendas and ignorance. 

Basically to have value you've got to have weight behind the commentary and constructive feedback not just "do better". Of course the other half of the coin is GW has to want to accept such critical evaluation and respond to it in a positive manner. If issues stem from key staff with attitudes/ways of working that have - honestly - worked for 30 years of GW selling games then you're up against a hard barrier. 

 

Best you could do is present improvements in a form that would result in improved benefits for GW. Since sales are currently in excess of GW's production capacity you might have to consider looking at things like gamer uptake and gamer retention. You might also look at means to market through improvement and suchlike. Basically you have to find some proper carrots to hang before the cart so that GW would want to adopt changes. 

 

Finally you've got to work out who to send this information too. Just sending it to GW's front line staff might get it put to one side; or dumped into a "general feedback" email bin that only gets glanced at. So you likely have to work out who in GW is a key player (manager) and thus how to word the letter and who you are pitching it too. Chances are you might need to go above the balance team who might not get the say-so in choices. Heck they might be wanting the same as us, but are constrained by other elements. 

Or do you identify key shareholders and then send the message to them wrapped with the overall message of it strengthening the games market hold; improving its standing; improving its sales and resulting in increased sales potential thus opening up potential new markets for expansion and thus increased share value. 

Heck if you went all out the same message, worded differently and with enough weight behind it delivered to different key stakeholders would be the best approach. Of course that is a lot of work and it could still be ignored/overlooked/not acted upon. 

[hobgoblinclub]

6 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

They do. A lot. KO is an extremely prominent example where the units themselves did not change very much, a number of stat buffs and a few nerfs which they needed as an underperforming army. The exception being the rules change to how transports worked, and the addition of the new fly high rule, and suddenly blam those very reasonable stats became a top performing army. The army gets an immense power boost just from the interaction of those two rules. People say KO show GW making new releases better, except they aren't new. Those kits were released in first edition and spent all of 2nd edition up till now being bad. Why did GW make a whole new line of miniatures bad for so long? The recent change of removing the stacking of wound-negating abilities reduced Pusgoyles, an already sub par unit, to the point where there is no reason to take them. Going back to the change of edition, when the Nighthaunt book first hit it made Legions of Nagash a top player, because of the interaction of grimghast reapers with the LoN rules (note that within their own 'tome they were reasonably balanced). Back when GW introduced the horde unit discount it catapulted to the top a number of units with scaling buffs based of number of models. I could go on for quite a while on examples of this.

I feel like KO are actually an extreme example. Because they play in a new design space, GW actually made some mistakes here. They were clearly intended to be filth (see the ridiculous amount of rend and multi-damage). However, GW actually made them op, because it was such a new style of army and they weren't sure how things would interact (much like Ogres in 6th Edition). KO could be used to argue both ways. I don't remember the introduction of the horde discount making too much difference to the power level of any old units. The Nighthaunt book definitely boost LoN though, which, you're right, did seem like an accidental symptom of the release.

6 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

If points and eratta changed every month that would exhaust a large number of players trying to keep up with them. What GW does do is a two-week FAQ after a new battletome hits to deal with immediate problems. 

I think there are many players already exhausted as it is. A battletome shouldn't need it. Or at least every battletome shouldn't need it so extensively. And battletomes should never need it with rules the entire community can see are broken as early as the previews. 

6 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

Nighthaunt, Sylvaneth, Wartribes, Mawtribes, Beasts of Chaos, Gloomspite, Khorne, Nurgle, Cities, Slaves, Legions, and I'm betting Sons of Behemat all were not meta-dominators when they were released. Neither were any of the three campaign book allegiance options.

Nighthaunt were pretty good on release (although not fantastic they certainly sold some Stalkers). Sylvaneth, Wartribes, Mawtribes, BoC, Khorne, and Cities all weren't selling any new minis. 

Legions were the absolute filth on release. 

Look at the hit rate for books selling new minis hitting the top of the meta. That could be revealing? Tzeentch, KO, Daughters, Deepkin, Slaanesh, Bonereapers.

You do put forward some interesting arguments though. I'm pretty convinced it's deliberate but there are probably some accidental outliers (Stalkers, for example). 

I've not been on this forum for a while. Is there an easy way to split a quote rather than requoting and deleting bits? I can't remember... 

[Greybeard86]

1 hour ago, Kadeton said:

I actually don't see the need for knowledge of GW's intentions there. The essential question is "Do we want a competitive scene which uses GW's rules as-is, or do we want to alter them ourselves?" Who cares why GW isn't writing the rules the way you want - if you don't like them, it's better to focus on what you can do about it, not why it's happening.

It would be much better to work with GW for better rules. Mantic, for example, has some sort of player's council to officially give feedback on rules. Do not know how well that's working, it is just an example.

1 hour ago, Kadeton said:

Um... a bunch of people have been saying exactly that, in this thread. Sure, those people might be accidentally conflating GW and GW's design team as being one and the same, but that's a distinction that I think is important enough to call out whenever people make that mistake. Whenever people ask "Why don't the designers just write better rules/fix imbalances/do the obvious thing?" the answer should always be "Because GW doesn't enable them to," and not any other reason.

GW's design team are employees of the corporation, so yes, they are part of GW. If you feel the need to highlight that maybe they would make "better" decisions (as in better for balance) if they were free to do so, I am guessing that yes, that would be the case. But has anyone here been arguing that GW's game designers are writing bad rules on bad faith? I would love some quotes.

[hobgoblinclub]

4 hours ago, Kramer said:

I’m trying to open up the possibility that your wrong. Just like this comparison is wrong. At least here in the Netherlands we have a difference between murder and manslaughter. And the fact that I instantly knew these terms I’m pretty sure the UK has as well. 

intent matters. And if you claim to know why GW does things. You better back it up. Rather than just say the community accepts it. 

it’s a worrying trend in general. Less so when discussing toy soldiers I admit . But that’s how conspiracy theories start and maintain themselves. Creating an echo chamber for the suspicions, a whole lot of conversation bias, and the filter bubble (on a bigger scale at least) doesn’t help. 

again you might also be right and it’s all intentional on the part of GW. But if you arguing the intent you need to bring up sources for that. Or else be honest that you are speculating just like the rest of us. It’s an interesting discussion though  

This reads like an effort to shut down a reasonable argument. @Greybeard86 has put forward some real balance and supported pretty much everything with evidence. Comparing his points to conspiracy feels like a low blow. It definitely is an interesting discussion! It's the first time I've been drawn back into this forum for about a year! 😁

[hobgoblinclub]

4 hours ago, Kadeton said:

GW's decisions on when to release a given set of rules (in whatever their current state of balance might be) will, I guarantee, not be made by the designers of those rules. That's a marketing process, not a development one.

This. Let's not get drawn into the playtest argument again. It's a company philosophy argument not a playtest one. They've literally said many times that they have nothing to do with these decisions. 

 

3 hours ago, Saxon said:

I would love to know how many practice games the final Slaanesh, Tzeentch and OBR versions got because these factions have been nerfed really hard. You only have to look at the sub-forum for OBR on here to see the discontent with the revised rules. Is this an acceptable outcome for GW to upset a lot of players by gutting their army they likely haven't even finished painting? How do you get them hyped for the next release if you do this?

Again, it's not the playtesters. This is a different discussion. They don't decide what to release how how to release it. 

[hobgoblinclub]

3 hours ago, Kadeton said:

I make "excuses" for the designers, because most of the commenters here have absolutely no idea of the challenges of balancing a complex game. People call them lazy, incompetent, malicious, and so on all the time. I think that's totally unfair. They're just people doing their best under the circumstances.

I don't think we are. Maybe one or two people on here are. But arguing that the meta manipulation is deliberate isn't to say they're malicious. I'm pretty convinced what we're seeing is absolutely deliberate but I also think it's viable and, clearly successful business model, although that's not to say I like it. 

I think, part of the reason is difficult to pin down their intentions, is because there's almost certainly conflicting intentions within GW itself. The designers are, most likely, aiming for balance but there's also pressure to achieve sales and they have to factor that in too. If new armies were sold purely on aesthetic, it'd negatively impact sales. Aesthetic sales + new filth sales = more than just aesthetic sales. That's undeniable. 

[Kasper]

16 minutes ago, hobgoblinclub said:

I don't think we are. Maybe one or two people on here are. But arguing that the meta manipulation is deliberate isn't to say they're malicious. I'm pretty convinced what we're seeing is absolutely deliberate but I also think it's viable and, clearly successful business model, although that's not to say I like it. 

I think, part of the reason is difficult to pin down their intentions, is because there's almost certainly conflicting intentions within GW itself. The designers are, most likely, aiming for balance but there's also pressure to achieve sales and they have to factor that in too. If new armies were sold purely on aesthetic, it'd negatively impact sales. Aesthetic sales + new filth sales = more than just aesthetic sales. That's undeniable. 

When GW print rules for a new army I dont think they can predict or really know how well it will fare in the hands of thousands of players across the globe. They might have an inhouse playtesting team or external playtesters, but thats a limited amount of people. Things are different when you release it to the masses that can get much more creative when spitballing ideas in WhatsApp groups etc. Sure, you can print absurd rules such as prenerf Slaanesh and predict it will do well, but I dont think they had any idea when they printed the rules for KO or Seraphon. KO was accompanied by a massive point drop, so it obviously compounds. Basically I dont think what they do is deliberate in any way. The rule designers print cool and fun ******, playtesters reel some of the things in, but other than that it is likely happy accidents at times.