Metawatch article highlighting the total lack of balance

[hobgoblinclub]

13 minutes ago, Kasper said:

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.

True to a certain extent. But, as we've pointed out on this thread, there are a great, great many examples where it's blatantly obvious that something is op even before release. Very often, the community is screaming at a preview article, or screaming on the release of the book, or screaming when the army hits the tournament scene, and GW do nothing. Skyfires got nerfed after shooting everything to pieces for eighteen months and the whole community being aware of how stupidly powerful they were. Why did GW wait so long before reacting? I can only assume because they were selling truck loads of them. 

Again, this isn't me accusing them of Machiavellian practices or them doing anything underhand. It's good business sense. To the counter argument seems almost silly, doesn't it? 'Don't alter rules to boost sales' would be a pretty reckless company philosophy. 

 The counter argument might say, 'they're not trying to boost sales of individual armies in the short term because the long term health/balance of the game matters more'. And I completely agree that should be true. However, it's patently obvious that that's not the trajectory we're on.

The most interesting question, which we're moving away from again (into snarky comments about semantics) is whether or not this is deliberate.

All of these are true statements:

Individual armies see spikes in power (whether new or not).

The meta shifts dramatically.

Power seems to be cyclical. 

If the above weren't true, this discussion would not happen. The discussion should be about intent. And to state that it's not deliberate is surely deeply insulting to GW, designers and all? 

[JackStreicher]

51 minutes ago, Kasper said:

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.

As people have pointed out several times: Too many broken combos or bad rules are super easy to spot. If anyone ever had a good hard look at the rules, those broken or not working rules would have been spotted.
No one ever had a look at the rules or they simply left it in for whatever reason.

[Greybeard86]

25 minutes ago, hobgoblinclub said:

All of these are true statements:

Individual armies see spikes in power (whether new or not).

The meta shifts dramatically.

Power seems to be cyclical. 

If the above weren't true, this discussion would not happen. The discussion should be about intent. And to state that it's not deliberate is surely deeply insulting to GW, designers and all? 

Exactly. One cannot approach a large corporation the same way would when dealing with a small studio. A small studio may be constrained, inexperienced, filled with semi-professional individuals that care more about the game and having a good time than about maximizing profits.

GW is a large corporation with very high margins (it is publicly traded, so this is available for everyone to check) owned by investment funds. It is not "all in good faith, just goofy mistakes happening". They have business plans that spans years, they make conscious decisions on their release schedules, they have viability plans for new armies and they have business intelligence data and analysis of the past sales performance of models that spans decades.

While everyone can make mistakes, on ocassion, the meta shifts across al their products are far too predictable to be "goofiness". They track point costs and damage / defensive / utility outputs across all books, they have lots of data regarding what types of abilities are powerful on the table, and so on. When they take a "good" unit and they nerf it to be "bad", they have made a conscious decision. When they put in a few units that are better than the rest of the book, and then over time rotate which units those are, they are doing so on purpose.

At least, in my opinion, this is the most logical explanation for the meta shifts. The "they are boys making cool rules and printing ****" seems far more of a stretch.

[Kasper]

36 minutes ago, hobgoblinclub said:

True to a certain extent. But, as we've pointed out on this thread, there are a great, great many examples where it's blatantly obvious that something is op even before release. Very often, the community is screaming at a preview article, or screaming on the release of the book, or screaming when the army hits the tournament scene, and GW do nothing. Skyfires got nerfed after shooting everything to pieces for eighteen months and the whole community being aware of how stupidly powerful they were. Why did GW wait so long before reacting? I can only assume because they were selling truck loads of them. 

Again, this isn't me accusing them of Machiavellian practices or them doing anything underhand. It's good business sense. To the counter argument seems almost silly, doesn't it? 'Don't alter rules to boost sales' would be a pretty reckless company philosophy. 

 The counter argument might say, 'they're not trying to boost sales of individual armies in the short term because the long term health/balance of the game matters more'. And I completely agree that should be true. However, it's patently obvious that that's not the trajectory we're on.

The most interesting question, which we're moving away from again (into snarky comments about semantics) is whether or not this is deliberate.

All of these are true statements:

Individual armies see spikes in power (whether new or not).

The meta shifts dramatically.

Power seems to be cyclical. 

If the above weren't true, this discussion would not happen. The discussion should be about intent. And to state that it's not deliberate is surely deeply insulting to GW, designers and all? 

I think there are 2 different discussions to be had here. One is if GW can predict what impact a new army will have on the meta/competitive scene (I dont think they fully know how strong an army is before we get our hands on it), another is when/if they should intervene when it is obvious that something is stupidly broken. I do think some immediate issues fix themselves as people get experience with said issue and learn to play around/counter it, others are too absurd and need to be reeled back in. 

11 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

As people have pointed out several times: Too many broken combos or bad rules are super easy to spot. If anyone ever had a good hard look at the rules, those broken or not working rules would have been spotted.
No one ever had a look at the rules or they simply left it in for whatever reason.

Bad/stupid rules doesnt always equal to an army being crazy broken. It often is, but not always. Again, their internal/external playtesting team might not turn the army to an 11, but the community spitballing ideas and finetuning the army sure will. 

[JackStreicher]

1 minute ago, Kasper said:

Bad/stupid rules doesnt always equal to an army being crazy broken. It often is, but not always. Again, their internal/external playtesting team might not turn the army to an 11, but the community spitballing ideas and finetuning the army sure will. 

That‘s not what I mean:

Petrifex +1 save. Even a noob will realize that this is broken.

Changehost battallion: cheap, no tax, insane ability.

S2D: No more comment about this faction apart from: I looked at the BT and wrote in here: They don‘t deal any damage. Which in general turned out to be true.

All the utter dominance of the magicphade shenanigans 

Slaaneshs out of Order fighting 

Hearthguard Berzerkerz

The „God“ Alarielle

Bad Warscrolls in general

 

It usually needs no genius to spot the obvious ones, heck it doesn‘t even take time.

Yet there are some interactions that are harder to predict but become obvious after 3-5 games:

The Namartii issue.

Anvilgard being a one-trick pony

KO at their current state

The downgrade of Sylvaneth

etc.

[Kasper]

6 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

That‘s not what I mean:

Petrifex +1 save. Even a noob will realize that this is broken.

Changehost battallion: cheap, no tax, insane ability.

S2D: No more comment about this faction apart from: I looked at the BT and wrote in here: They don‘t deal any damage. Which in general turned out to be true.

All the utter dominance of the magicphade shenanigans 

Slaaneshs out of Order fighting 

Hearthguard Berzerkerz

The „God“ Alarielle

Bad Warscrolls in general

 

It usually needs no genius to spot the obvious ones, heck it doesn‘t even take time.

Yet there are some interactions that are harder to predict but become obvious after 3-5 games:

The Namartii issue.

Anvilgard being a one-trick pony

KO at their current state

The downgrade of Sylvaneth

etc.

I agree with you to a certain degree, but as an example Petrifex giving a blanket +1 save isnt inherently broken imo (it is an incredible buff no doubt). It is the combination of insane save characteristic, with full rerolls for little to no resource cost and with extremely high damage output that made an additional +1 problematic. Ontop of this you have regeneration abilities that further compounds the issue and creates a really terrible player experience. 

S2D is a pretty good example of a book with a few tricks and strong abilities, like the Khorne DP, but it doesnt cause issues because they arent murdering you (apart from Marauders, ****** those guys) with brutal damage or near impenetrable units. So even if they print powerful abilities, they are not inherently broken.

[Scurvydog]

GW has been really terrible at balancing especially sub factions for some armies, causing huge issues. Also sometimes an artifact or battalion combos it out of control, despite the core allegiance rules and warscroll rules working quite alright.

KO domination is very much helped by the Ziflin + spell in a bottle combo on top of the other solid rules, without those 2 insanely oppressive mechanics, the army would simply be great and not an oppressive nightmare to face, if they include those things.

Khorne they gave a sub faction with fight twice command. When you do that you break a melee centric book, anyone should know this... That instantly makes demon heroes the only viable coice, which makes bloodthirsters the only viable choice for damage in the book. Then they add a battalion to improve this. In Wrath of the Everchosen what did they do there? Make a sub faction allowing more blood thirsters???? what GW... what are you thinking!?

OBR has terrible sub factions, either take the 1 all the special characters are from or take the other one with all the best buffs, artifact and trait, while the rest are niche or trolling choices. Even the Stalliarch lords niche can be covered quite effectively by a battalion instead.

This OBR problem also extends to Stormcast who has terrible sub faction rules and only 1 being used, and this 1 sub faction (Anvils) results in the entire book favoring ranged combat, terrible terrible design. All the named characters are then put in the most boring faction like the OBR which feels extremely limiting.

I hope GW will review this and make it all more consistent. It is very annoying that some books get a healthy mix of ok factions, some get trash and 1 faction the entire book hinges on, some get mount traits, some do not, some do not even have sub factions... it is a mess and should be streamlined between books in a better way.

[Beastmaster]

I calculated I got 2716 points in 9th age ogre khans models. 

[JackStreicher]

33 minutes ago, Beastmaster said:

I calculated I got 2716 points in 9th age ogre khans models. 

So 1k in AoS?

[Beastmaster]

11 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:

So 1k in AoS?

1320, now that I can’t use my Gargant anymore. 😄

Seriously. If GW doesn’t want me to enjoy my army, I’ll look in other places. Won’t let them take away my hobby enthusiasm. 

Edited October 26, 2020 by Beastmaster

[NinthMusketeer]

I want to point out something; the GW 'crash' as a result of terrible game states did happen. But we need to translate the dialect of internet-ese to understand that "crash" or "go out of business" actually means "notable loss of sales and growth." We saw that happen in the mid 2010s.

Then in 2016 GW abruptly changed practices. They created the community site. They launched the first GHB. They started doing the Start Collecting boxes. They lowered prices on a number of kits via reboxing. They completely redid 40k with 8th edition. They continued doing yearly updates with the GHB & Chapter Approved.

And they became the best performing stock on the UK market. 

[hobgoblinclub]

6 hours ago, Kasper said:

I think there are 2 different discussions to be had here. One is if GW can predict what impact a new army will have on the meta/competitive scene (I dont think they fully know how strong an army is before we get our hands on it), another is when/if they should intervene when it is obvious that something is stupidly broken. I do think some immediate issues fix themselves as people get experience with said issue and learn to play around/counter it, others are too absurd and need to be reeled back in. 

I don't think they can fully predict the impact of new rules /armies. That's fair enough. It's a complicated game, mistakes are going to happen. 

But it's not funny rules interactions that we see. It's, regularly, units which are clearly spectacularly powerful based purely on their own warscrolls, or allegiance abilities which are op on their own. Yes, we'll see some unpredictable corner cases. That isn't the complaint.

As I've said, there are very often rules which are clearly incredibly powerful from the moment we see them. 

[Greybeard86]

23 minutes ago, hobgoblinclub said:

I don't think they can fully predict the impact of new rules /armies. That's fair enough. It's a complicated game, mistakes are going to happen. 

But it's not funny rules interactions that we see. It's, regularly, units which are clearly spectacularly powerful based purely on their own warscrolls, or allegiance abilities which are op on their own. Yes, we'll see some unpredictable corner cases. That isn't the complaint.

As I've said, there are very often rules which are clearly incredibly powerful from the moment we see them. 

This.

It is incredibly obvious when they shuffle power levels within books. Sometimes they just straight up buff some units to be better than the rest (can be seen at first sight), but then they rotate them through giving abilities, changing point costs, and so on.

I have an extremely hard time reconciling this with "but they just couldn't predict it, you know, they just thought it was cool and didn't think it through".

[Popisdead]

On 10/22/2020 at 2:17 PM, 123lac said:

 

This is just embarrassing on behalf of GW's rules writers.

man I bet their sales people are sure not embarrassed.  

[Saxon]

8 hours ago, Kasper said:

I agree with you to a certain degree, but as an example Petrifex giving a blanket +1 save isnt inherently broken imo (it is an incredible buff no doubt). It is the combination of insane save characteristic, with full rerolls for little to no resource cost and with extremely high damage output that made an additional +1 problematic. Ontop of this you have regeneration abilities that further compounds the issue and creates a really terrible player experience. 

S2D is a pretty good example of a book with a few tricks and strong abilities, like the Khorne DP, but it doesnt cause issues because they arent murdering you (apart from Marauders, ****** those guys) with brutal damage or near impenetrable units. So even if they print powerful abilities, they are not inherently broken.

It was broken in that it was really unfun to play against in addition to being a poor rule. How did GW think people would react to Petrifix rules? 

This is what perplexes me. Surely they knew the reaction would be negative? 

[Marcvs]

18 minutes ago, Saxon said:

It was broken in that it was really unfun to play against in addition to being a poor rule. How did GW think people would react to Petrifix rules? 

This is what perplexes me. Surely they knew the reaction would be negative? 

I suppose it goes like this:

IF expected $$$ from people buying the "new strong thing" > expected $$$ lost to people NOT buying stuff because of negative experience

THEN release new strong thing

 

(of course I know I am simplifying, hope that's clear)

[Saxon]

16 minutes ago, Marcvs said:

I suppose it goes like this:

IF expected $$$ from people buying the "new strong thing" > expected $$$ lost to people NOT buying stuff because of negative experience

THEN release new strong thing

 

(of course I know I am simplifying, hope that's clear)

I understand where you are coming from but to suggest GW is deliberately designing rules to sell models fast is a controversial opinion on this forum!

[Eldarain]

It has been incredibly noticable that a wave of "I love their lore and models" Bonereaper players have jumped ship since the nerf. All the sale/swap groups I'm in have multiple large meta collections up for grabs.

[NinthMusketeer]

35 minutes ago, Saxon said:

I understand where you are coming from but to suggest GW is deliberately designing rules to sell models fast is a controversial opinion on this forum!

Yeah, when evidence clearly contradicts a conclusion it tends to be... 'controversial'.

Edited October 26, 2020 by NinthMusketeer

[NinthMusketeer]

2 hours ago, Popisdead said:

man I bet their sales people are sure not embarrassed.  

They are when models are awful. Remember; the OP stuff is noticeable because people use it. The crappy stuff isn't seen, but it is still there. Consistently and abundantly. There has never been a battletome release without at least one unit that was bad. There have been battletome releases without any units that were good, though.

But I have learned from Greybeard that for some all events = proof that GW planned it, so it can be tough to discuss. Model released and is good? Planned. Model released and is bad? Also planned. Army becomes more balanced by point changes? Definitely a scheme, not a legitimate effort to balance the game. Unit that was good or bad becomes the opposite? Part of the 'rotation'. Units that are good or bad and stay that way, also part of the 'rotation'. Units that are reasonable? Part of the planned imbalance. Brexit is probably part of GW's plan too!

[Saxon]

13 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

Yeah, when evidence clearly contradicts a conclusion it tends to be... 'controversial'.

The best thing about this is that there are only 2 outcomes, both of which many people really hate to admit. 

If GW don't deliberately create poor rules then they're doing it by accident which is probably even worse and indicates incompetence. As i said earlier in the thread, they've had 40 years to work on it so there are no excuses. 

Some of their recent output has been indefensible. 

Edited October 26, 2020 by Saxon

[NinthMusketeer]

8 minutes ago, Saxon said:

The best thing about this is that there are only 2 outcomes, both of which many people really hate to admit. 

If GW don't deliberately create poor rules then they're doing it by accident which is probably even worse and indicates incompetence. As i said earlier in the thread, they've had 40 years to work on it so there are no excuses. 

That's where the actual intent comes in. Yes they are bad, and we can see they know it (as opposed to Kirby years...), but WHY don't they overhaul things? IMO, because they don't feel the effort is worth the reward. They obviously lose players due to crappy balance, but they obviously generate sales from crappy balance as well. There is no need for a plan to rotate units on some wheel of OP/UP, they can just continue not being very good at balance and the meta will shake up frequently enough without them changing anything.

Imagine being given a hundred d6s and being told "if you arrange these to all be the same number I will give you $10, but if you arrange them to look random, I will give you $10." The suggestion that GW intentionally controls the meta is saying that they would individually place all hundred of those dice to look random. Personally I think they are happy to roll them.

Edited October 26, 2020 by NinthMusketeer

[Greybeard86]

25 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

They are when models are awful. Remember; the OP stuff is noticeable because people use it. The crappy stuff isn't seen, but it is still there. Consistently and abundantly. There has never been a battletome release without at least one unit that was bad. There have been battletome releases without any units that were good, though.

But I have learned from Greybeard that for some all events = proof that GW planned it, so it can be tough to discuss. Model released and is good? Planned. Model released and is bad? Also planned. Army becomes more balanced by point changes? Definitely a scheme, not a legitimate effort to balance the game. Unit that was good or bad becomes the opposite? Part of the 'rotation'. Units that are good or bad and stay that way, also part of the 'rotation'. Units that are reasonable? Part of the planned imbalance. Brexit is probably part of GW's plan too!

What can I say, I’m glad to be of service. Maybe one day I ll be able to go back to discuss what I joined TGA for, decent lists to bring to the table my old metal + new sculpts thematic armies. But when I see comments like yours, I feel like answering. 
 

There are so many bad faith arguments in your post that is hard to pick one.

Edited October 26, 2020 by Greybeard86

[Saxon]

13 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

That's where the actual intent comes in. Yes they are bad, and we can see they know it (as opposed to Kirby years...), but WHY don't they overhaul things? IMO, because they don't feel the effort is worth the reward. They obviously lose players due to crappy balance, but they obviously generate sales from crappy balance as well. There is no need for a plan to rotate units on some wheel of OP/UP, they can just continue not being very good at balance and the meta will shake up frequently enough without them changing anything.

Imagine being given a hundred d6s and being told "if you arrange these to all be the same number I will give you $10, but if you arrange them to look random, I will give you $10." The suggestion that GW intentionally controls the meta is saying that they would individually place all hundred of those dice to look random. Personally I think they are happy to roll them.

What i do not get is that there is all this talk of long term goals and strategies in regards to GW's progress moving forward. Surely game maintenance would form part of this long term strategy to ensure the community negative noise remains at a low level. You look at 40k where they appear to have really pulled their socks up in light of serious noise about 8th edition. 

This does not gel well with intentionally creating poor rules which upsets part of their customer base. I feel like deliberate imbalance to push sales is a short term win and a long term loss. 

To use your analogy regarding dice, it would be like getting paid $10/day to rearrange dice but if you do it randomly and drop a few on the floor on the way, by the end of the week you'll only be getting $7.

[NinthMusketeer]

56 minutes ago, Greybeard86 said:

What can I say, I’m glad to be of service. Maybe one day I ll be able to go back to discuss what I joined TGA for, decent lists to bring to the table my old metal + new sculpts thematic armies. But when I see comments like yours, I feel like answering. 
 

There are so many bad faith arguments in your post that is hard to pick one.

Claims without evidence are how you got to this point, doubling down on that is proving mine.