What would you like for AoS 3

[zilberfrid]

7 hours ago, Ragest said:

It depends, in competitive environments the "fun" is secondary, i don't tend to have fun y high elo in league of legends, or in mythic raids in wow, same with competitive magic or even clash royale, we are there to win.

Is different for casual games and there's where LRL fails, is not fun, is impossible to play vs with certain armies or certain lists and most of all, is so so so frustrating that everything you want to try is being negated, but is not just about lumineth, we are in the same position vs top tzeentch/seraphon/kharadron/idoneth/dok lists in different ways. Vs Idoneth, per example, i can move around and charge and alternate in combat phase, to fight 2+ unrendable eels that hit like trucks. I throw more dices, the result is the same.

There is no solucion about that, not in 3.0 or any edition, some lists will be a pain and some lists will be fun.

If an army is unsuited for casual play, it is unsuited for most players. It would be better to put a warning label on it "warning, pick only if you intend to only play it on tournaments." I've read here that players had their Slaanesh army on the shelf until it was balanced, because they couldn't find people to play against.

Also, why do you even play games if they are not fun, like the way you play those other games? 

I am not competetive at all, but when I do play a competition (like Commander Magic), I'm still there to have fun, while learning at the same time. I can't imagine spending a few hundred euros on models and a few months painting them, only to be miserable for a full day at a tournament. And then ever doing that again.

Edited March 9, 2021 by zilberfrid

[Ragest]

2 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

If an army is unsuited for casual play, it is unsuited for most players. It would be better to put a warning label on it "warning, pick only if you intend to only play it on tournaments." I've read here that players had their Slaanesh army on the shelf until it was balanced, because they couldn't find people to play against.

Also, why do you even play games if they are not fun, like the way you play those other games? 

I am not competetive at all, but when I do play a competition (like Commander Magic), I'm still there to have fun, while learning at the same time. I can't imagine spending a few hundred euros on models and a few months painting them, only to be miserable for a full day at a tournament. And then ever doing that again.

No, the army is perfect for casual play, but the syar teclis list not, that's the problem, and Lumineth is pretty fun, not for the rival, but in competitive play that¡s not important.

[zilberfrid]

17 minutes ago, Ragest said:

No, the army is perfect for casual play, but the syar teclis list not, that's the problem, and Lumineth is pretty fun, not for the rival, but in competitive play that¡s not important.

This is an important problem.

If the army is just a slog to play against, why would you?

Most games are not tournament, and if someone knowingly disregards the other player when buying the army, I don't want to play against them.

Most people just see the sculpts when picking the box, and from a glance at the rules can't see that they are buying an army they will struggle to find opponents for. Or they do find opponents because they want the new player to be able to play, and one side of the table isn't having a good time, and might reconsider doing that with other new players.

How is this a good game design?

It's not MTG, where entirely changing the deck to something different is just taking a few cards out and putting different cards in. Replacing a unit takes quite a bit of time in painting, and because many of the abilities of Lumineth are just seem to be there to frustrate the opponent, might not even achieve much.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

6 minutes ago, zilberfrid said:

Most people just see the sculpts when picking the box, and from a glance at the rules can't see that they are buying an army they will struggle to find opponents for. Or they do find opponents because they want the new player to be able to play, and one side of the table isn't having a good time, and might reconsider doing that with other new players.

Not to mention that people just care about whether or not their opponents have fun. I certainly know that I would not want to play an army that other players hate to play against, even if finding people to play with was not a problem. It would reduce the fun that I have playing that army, regardless of how strong the army is or how interesting the rules are otherwise.

[JonnyTheKing]

2 hours ago, Ragest said:

No, the army is perfect for casual play, but the syar teclis list not, that's the problem, and Lumineth is pretty fun, not for the rival, but in competitive play that¡s not important.

Player enjoyment is always important in this hobby, at the end of the day this isn’t League of Legends or any other competitive game. You are looking your opponent in the eyes from across the board not the screen, I would consider myself a fairly competitive player but I will always strive to take into account as to whether my list is fun to play in any competitive level.
 

Lumineth are unfun because of how uninteractive they are with the opponents army, I regularly play a Lumineth opponent and win the majority of my games against them but rarely leave the game feeling fulfilled as a player when I’m just told I can’t do stuff over and over again, get countless mortal wounds thrown at me from range without any serious penalty, it’s boring at the end of the day.
 

Even casually the army is not fun, I play Khorne mainly Khorne when I want to play casually and Lumineth essentially make the majority of the book useless when they’re such a small hero heavy army and you can do nothing to defend them when even line of sight doesn’t matter. I’m sorry but the army is very badly designed in certain areas, it’s not even a discussion or something that can be defended, it’s well known that it is a bad play experience and that is bad for the game as a whole. This hobby has always been about enjoyment first and it’s doing more damage to the game having Lumineth existing in the form that they do right now 

[whispersofblood]

3 hours ago, zilberfrid said:

If an army is unsuited for casual play, it is unsuited for most players. It would be better to put a warning label on it "warning, pick only if you intend to only play it on tournaments." I've read here that players had their Slaanesh army on the shelf until it was balanced, because they couldn't find people to play against.

Also, why do you even play games if they are not fun, like the way you play those other games? 

I am not competetive at all, but when I do play a competition (like Commander Magic), I'm still there to have fun, while learning at the same time. I can't imagine spending a few hundred euros on models and a few months painting them, only to be miserable for a full day at a tournament. And then ever doing that again.

We may have reached a point where the quasi-professionalization of Wargaming and its casual roots are at a nexus of incompatibility. Competitive anything is about decreasing interactivity to the most extremely level possible, this is true of all competitive endeavours. The best way to win is to minimize your opponent from doing the thing they want to do, you see it in Football during the era of oppressive possession stats, or high intensity pressing, of hyper vertical play, Hockey with generating power plays, or tennis with the focus on high quality serving. The last thing a competitively minded person wants to do is a thing that the opponent can interfere with. People see this on the micro level as Sentinels or Changehost, but on the macro level every game has to deal with this. What is a nurgle horde but a macro uninteractive slog, or basically everything Death except NH(by mistake). The questions that designers need to ask is how impactful can these problems be before it upsets the balance between playstyles to dramatically, and what level of these uninteractive mechanics does each play style require to function properly.

I still insist the level we should be worried about is ability to effect the outcome (the final score) of the game, the designers want and should rightly have the freedom to include as diverse a set of playstyles to include as many different sorts of people in the hobby as able. And, if you have a prefered way to play the game its your responsibility to yourself to match your expectations to your effort. Personally I would rather GW take risks, and produce micro-level "problems" such as Sentinels, then have GW be gun shy and produce uninspired macro-level products like HoS. Regardless of the presence of one off problems the number one indicator for the individual success of a player is still player skill, so long as that is true, diversity of playstyle even with what is being described as a particular one off problem is superior to the alternative. At any given time ,based on the game as a whole, certain playstyles will dominate and because of that factions best suited to that playstyle will do the best, a good indicator things have gone off the rails for designers and players is if a playstyle that maximizes these one-offs can dominate beyond what might be expected by player skill. 

[zilberfrid]

27 minutes ago, whispersofblood said:

We may have reached a point where the quasi-professionalization of Wargaming and its casual roots are at a nexus of incompatibility. Competitive anything is about decreasing interactivity to the most extremely level possible, this is true of all competitive endeavours. The best way to win is to minimize your opponent from doing the thing they want to do, you see it in Football during the era of oppressive possession stats, or high intensity pressing, of hyper vertical play, Hockey with generating power plays, or tennis with the focus on high quality serving. The last thing a competitively minded person wants to do is a thing that the opponent can interfere with. People see this on the micro level as Sentinels or Changehost, but on the macro level every game has to deal with this. What is a nurgle horde but a macro uninteractive slog, or basically everything Death except NH(by mistake). The questions that designers need to ask is how impactful can these problems be before it upsets the balance between playstyles to dramatically, and what level of these uninteractive mechanics does each play style require to function properly.

I still insist the level we should be worried about is ability to effect the outcome (the final score) of the game, the designers want and should rightly have the freedom to include as diverse a set of playstyles to include as many different sorts of people in the hobby as able. And, if you have a prefered way to play the game its your responsibility to yourself to match your expectations to your effort. Personally I would rather GW take risks, and produce micro-level "problems" such as Sentinels, then have GW be gun shy and produce uninspired macro-level products like HoS. Regardless of the presence of one off problems the number one indicator for the individual success of a player is still player skill, so long as that is true, diversity of playstyle even with what is being described as a particular one off problem is superior to the alternative. At any given time ,based on the game as a whole, certain playstyles will dominate and because of that factions best suited to that playstyle will do the best, a good indicator things have gone off the rails for designers and players is if a playstyle that maximizes these one-offs can dominate beyond what might be expected by player skill. 

The dichotomy between satisfying tournament players and casual players is something I can understand, but to be a valid competetive game, AoS would need to be balanced at its core. (Side thought, I think the double turn isn't going away, because it scrambles results so the win% do not seem as unreasonable).

It's also at odds with quite a few considerations model-wise.

If they were designing game first, even the halberds and spears of Freeguild Guard wouldn't exist, let alone the spears of the Lumineth, because you can't see the model as base+height only. What if someone is attacked from four sides with spearmen? You can't rotate the spears to not make deployment impossible at least somewhere.

Similar with different model variants. If you want to hide your heroes behind Sequitors, take only the Underworld Warbands, because they are higher because of the base.

Seeing as GW does not make only perfect cones as models, and does not make that much effort to balance armies, I can only see it as a game aimed at casual play. 

Things like the Sentinels, Spell in a Bottle can be spotted from a mile away as problematic, even from rules previews. They should start listening to playtest feedback.

But then again, my game of choice is Frostgrave, which many people will probably find too samey.

[Ragest]

53 minutes ago, JonnyTheKing said:

Player enjoyment is always important in this hobby, at the end of the day this isn’t League of Legends or any other competitive game. You are looking your opponent in the eyes from across the board not the screen, I would consider myself a fairly competitive player but I will always strive to take into account as to whether my list is fun to play in any competitive level.
 

Lumineth are unfun because of how uninteractive they are with the opponents army, I regularly play a Lumineth opponent and win the majority of my games against them but rarely leave the game feeling fulfilled as a player when I’m just told I can’t do stuff over and over again, get countless mortal wounds thrown at me from range without any serious penalty, it’s boring at the end of the day.
 

Even casually the army is not fun, I play Khorne mainly Khorne when I want to play casually and Lumineth essentially make the majority of the book useless when they’re such a small hero heavy army and you can do nothing to defend them when even line of sight doesn’t matter. I’m sorry but the army is very badly designed in certain areas, it’s not even a discussion or something that can be defended, it’s well known that it is a bad play experience and that is bad for the game as a whole. This hobby has always been about enjoyment first and it’s doing more damage to the game having Lumineth existing in the form that they do right now 

You are definig aswell fullskink-koak, tzeench, kharadron and dok pre tome. And gargants are even more unfun to play, just a sack of wounds staying into points.

If you take off slaves and the latest two, that is too early to take conclussions, there are the latest tomes gw released. 

Maybe you are looking for a different game.

[Wraith]

There is a well balanced game for tournaments. It's called chess. But it seems many people find a fantasy miniatures game more appealing than chess. So what is this 'player enjoyment' element? Is it really in how the game plays out or is it sharing a common interest with a group of people? What is it that makes the game fun?

I find AoS interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is the hobby community aspect. As regards rules, they are not perfect, but they are innovative. I think it was worth it to abandon the old WHFB rules to open the way for new ideas. I've looked at other games, like KoW, but the mechanics are a bit old fashion. There needs to be fresh approaches to wargame rules. GW has potential here as they base their concepts on individual models, rather than the abstract unit, as became the fashion in the '80s and '90s. KoW is very '90s in it's conception. AoS might build more complex unit rules from ideas like the LRL rules for blocks and shoving. Maybe a file replacement system for combat might be experimented with?  ID rules for restricting shooting target options, etc. All these experiments might lead to a new idea of how to simulate the known emergent properties of soldiers fighting as a unit better than the previously tried ideas in other rule stems. This matters for future computer game designers, as their basic algorithm concepts typically come from board or miniature game rules. So AoS is interesting as a sandpit.

Competitive gaming does have a negative impact on any rule system. But I think GW games tend to change so frequently (deliberately) which helps to mitigate this. I should point out any worthwhile attempt at historical battle simulation is not going to be balanced. Mongols were better than most opponents. That is a historical fact and the rules would be a poor simulation not to reflect it. So historical gaming is not really that suitable for competitions. But that is what people want. If they complain too much about lack of balance, there is chess.

Edited March 9, 2021 by Wraith

[Boar]

21 minutes ago, Wraith said:

There is a well balanced game for tournaments. It's called chess

Just my pet peeve, but chess only get balanced when both players get to play even split between colors. And advantage for white actually increases with skill level of players.

[JonnyTheKing]

44 minutes ago, Ragest said:

You are definig aswell fullskink-koak, tzeench, kharadron and dok pre tome. And gargants are even more unfun to play, just a sack of wounds staying into points.

If you take off slaves and the latest two, that is too early to take conclussions, there are the latest tomes gw released. 

Maybe you are looking for a different game.

Listing other problem armies isn’t a defence for Lumineth really is it though, the difference between those and Lumineth is that they have to be lists tailored in a certain way, whereas it’s literally as soon as you see Sentinels or the Cathalar  you know you are in for an unfun time. If Sentinels were 200-220 points they would still see major play, that highlights just how strong that warscroll is. 
 

There is a reason AoS  players who I follow are taking breaks and going back to 40K and SW Legions etc, the game has a lot of problems right now and Lumineth are not the only problem right now, but they need addressed, whether that be a core rule change in 3rd Ed or a warscroll revisit for their problem units and that is the same for armies such as Seraphon.

Even though you say it isn’t, the game is still always about fun, tabletop games are a social contract too, you play BS lists and your table will turn awkward very quickly, if that’s what you want then fair enough but is it unhealthy in every level of the game

[JonnyTheKing]

To bring this thread back topic because it’s very much gone off topic:

apart from the problematic shooting meta going on right now that needs addressed I’d love to see the battleshock phase get a bit of a revamp in 3rd Ed. 40K has a pretty simple way of doing the phase right now that works well and I would be up for this being implented into AoS

I’d also 100% love an Age of Sigmar Crusade system because Crusade is super fun 

[Wraith]

27 minutes ago, Boar said:

Just my pet peeve, but chess only get balanced when both players get to play even split between colors. And advantage for white actually increases with skill level of players.

Yes, that is interesting. So it is the tournament system that needs balance rather that the rule system. Each pair must play each other twice, swapping armies for the second round. Also, each table should be supplied with a common set of dice. This would ensure that relative player skill is most accurately evaluated. I mean, that is what tournaments are for, right? Evaluating the relative skills of players and generating a ranking record.

Or are they? Maybe they are really just excuses to get together with fellow hobbyists and show off? Or catch up with friends? I guess if enough money is involved (as with professional sport) then it becomes more serious.

[Landohammer]

21 minutes ago, JonnyTheKing said:

To bring this thread back topic because it’s very much gone off topic:

apart from the problematic shooting meta going on right now that needs addressed I’d love to see the battleshock phase get a bit of a revamp in 3rd Ed. 40K has a pretty simple way of doing the phase right now that works well and I would be up for this being implented into AoS

I’d also 100% love an Age of Sigmar Crusade system because Crusade is super fun 

I hope AOS adopts a lot of 40k 9th edition changes. Most notably the terrain being a lot more impactful, battleshock being overhauled, and the secondary objectives becoming 50% of the game. Also getting +10 VPs from having a fully painted army is nice

Inspiring Presence limited to once per game is also nice, but AOS 3.0 really needs to clean out all of the battleshock immunity that is available right now. Its just too common.

While I have no confidence in GW's ability to properly test/balance a codex lately, the 40K ninth edition changes were spot on and I was overall quite impressed. Though I understand they outsourced a lot of the playtesting to  the community. 

 

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

13 minutes ago, Wraith said:

Yes, that is interesting. So it is the tournament system that needs balance rather that the rule system. Each pair must play each other twice, swapping armies for the second round. Also, each table should be supplied with a common set of dice. This would ensure that relative player skill is most accurately evaluated. I mean, that is what tournaments are for, right? Evaluating the relative skills of players and generating a ranking record.

Or are they? Maybe they are really just excuses to get together with fellow hobbyists and show off? Or catch up with friends? I guess if enough money is involved (as with professional sport) then it becomes more serious.

AoS is a list building game and follows different standards for competitive fairness than chess. Your skill at putting together your army is supposed to influence your performance in a tournament. There is no reason to try to compensate for it by swapping armies or whatever. In chess, the difference between black and white is just that white goes first. AoS already has a mechanic that is supposed to mitigate that advantage: Rolling for turn priority (double turns).

 

[whispersofblood]

1 hour ago, zilberfrid said:

The dichotomy between satisfying tournament players and casual players is something I can understand, but to be a valid competetive game, AoS would need to be balanced at its core. (Side thought, I think the double turn isn't going away, because it scrambles results so the win% do not seem as unreasonable). 

It's also at odds with quite a few considerations model-wise.

If they were designing game first, even the halberds and spears of Freeguild Guard wouldn't exist, let alone the spears of the Lumineth, because you can't see the model as base+height only. What if someone is attacked from four sides with spearmen? You can't rotate the spears to not make deployment impossible at least somewhere.

Similar with different model variants. If you want to hide your heroes behind Sequitors, take only the Underworld Warbands, because they are higher because of the base.

Seeing as GW does not make only perfect cones as models, and does not make that much effort to balance armies, I can only see it as a game aimed at casual play. 

Things like the Sentinels, Spell in a Bottle can be spotted from a mile away as problematic, even from rules previews. They should start listening to playtest feedback.

But then again, my game of choice is Frostgrave, which many people will probably find too samey.

I would suggest the game is actually quite balanced when it comes to competitive play, the disparity has more to do with tournaments being catch all type events rather than purely competitive. I have a hypothesis that when we eventually get back to table top gaming the disparity in win rate is going to jump drastically, right now we have data for as close to a closed competitive meta as we can possibly get and things are actually ok. I feel like, as I don't have any data to support this theory, that the game is actually heavily distorted because people play the game with the models they like and I'm not sure there is a way to solve for that.

There is a huge difference between player skill being the dominant factor in determining results and the presence of mechanics players find offensive. Spell in a bottle is the perfect example of this, as are Sentinels. Competitive players ultimately want enough balance that they can a) express their personality, and b) player skill is the generally the deciding factor. Getting "a" means creating issues in matchups, but competitive players are quite sanguine about that I find.

As to you second point, tbh it isn't an issue in my opinion. The first example is a necessary abstraction to turn what is essentially a skirmish ruleset into an army game, and the second isn't actually true it is basically impossible to hide a model behind another model that isn't call a Great Unclean One. The ruleset basically makes these physical differences mostly irrelevant. 

Again these things might feel bad, but the game is perfectly capable of absorbing them from a mechanical perspective, and I generally err against listening to technical feedback from the public. If you look at lists from TTS you'll find despite the addition of Sentinels and shooting we are seeing infantry heros persist and even proliferate. 

Your position on Frostgrave perfectly encapsulates the difference in opinion. Personally I find Frostgrave is as intellectually stimulating as choosing between shades of warm off white, I find the universe of interactions is miniscule, and even as a roleplay function a video game does it better, faster, with much less investment. I "like" that AoS often doesn't have a prepackaged modular right answer, and that you have to find a way to  adapt to what is happening on the board. This is what keeps the game fresh across multiple iterations and why WHFB was less gripping than 40k, the games could effectively be scripted at the high level, and descend into mechanical chaos at the casual level. Where as AoS with one opponent, even with 2 armies with limited direct interaction, you could play a game every other week for a year and still not play the same game twice.

[Doko]

Seeing the last tomes,seems for aos3.0 the new "cancer"(as was free sumon,attack first,attack last,attack twice in other editions) gonna be the skills with "you cant pile in".

So seems more penaltys for melle armys

[yukishiro1]

5 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

I still insist the level we should be worried about is ability to effect the outcome (the final score) of the game, 

Right, and that's where the two camps come down. You're not going to convince people in my camp that it isn't a design problem if we don't enjoy playing the game against a given faction, just so as long as it doesn't overly impact the final score. And I'm presumably not going to convince you by saying it five more times that you should actually care about player enjoyment when it comes to game design, because if you are of the opinion that players don't actually know what they like or dislike or what they want or don't want in a game, you aren't going to care that I say I hate playing against LRL, because I can't be trusted to know what my own feelings actually are. So there's a difference in fundamental assumptions there that can't be bridged. 

 

 

Edited March 9, 2021 by yukishiro1

[whispersofblood]

5 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

Right, and that's where the two camps come down. You're not going to convince people in my camp that it isn't a design problem if we don't enjoy playing the game against a given faction, just so as long as it doesn't overly impact the final score. And I'm presumably not going to convince you by saying it five more times that you should actually care about player enjoyment when it comes to game design, because if you are of the opinion that players don't actually know what they like or dislike or what they want or don't want in a game, you aren't going to care that I say I hate playing against LRL, because I can't be trusted to know what my own feelings actually are. So there's a difference in fundamental assumptions there that can't be bridged. 

 

 

Where did I say that? You don't find that particular interaction to be enjoyable, that's totally subjective, personally it doesn't register on my emotional spectrum but I've not denied you find it not fun. You've been voluminous in describing what the feeling is, but there is no why. Feelings by their very nature are unconscious responsive to stimuli, a reflexive reaction, not a high quality barometer of "correctness". Some deliberate exploration can uncover if there is actually a problem or if you are just emoting (which isn't a problem its a normal human response).

So, if you want to do this let's do this. Why do you think you find it to be unenjoyable/unfun?

[Wraith]

5 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

AoS is a list building game and follows different standards for competitive fairness than chess. Your skill at putting together your army is supposed to influence your performance in a tournament. There is no reason to try to compensate for it by swapping armies or whatever. In chess, the difference between black and white is just that white goes first. AoS already has a mechanic that is supposed to mitigate that advantage: Rolling for turn priority (double turns).

 

The problem with the idea that list design is part of the tournament skillet, is that effective lists are typically devised by a few and copied by many. Is chasing the meta a skill too?

We need to think about maximising enjoyment, right? What could be more amusing, and thus enjoyable, that watched no some meta chasing smart Alec getting hammered by his own Death Star? Certainly the audience will love it.

Designing rules bending lists and the resulting stampede to copy those lists is what causes the sort of damage that competitive professional sports have suffered, as described in an earlier post. GW attempts to correct for this by employing the nerf bat. If GW is nerfing it, then it isn’t skill we are talking about. It is finding an unfair advantage to avoid being tested against to other guy’s skill.

So, in theory at least, switching armies does allow test of skill at playing the game. The real issue with the idea is in practicality. Who wants some stranger handling their carefully painted miniatures? Maybe the top world competition needs GW supplied armies to determine the world’s best player?

[SeanMaguire1991]

Nerf shooting with Sigmar's hammer. 

Hate playing against Kharadron and Skyre.

[yukishiro1]

3 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

You've been voluminous in describing what the feeling is, but there is no why.

But this just isn't true, and is what I'm talking about. I've spent literally pages of text in this thread explaining the why, which comes down to a lack of agency. Sentinels cover 90% or more of the table with their threat range, they ignore line of sight, and they effectively ignore to hit modifiers,  to wound modifiers, and armor saves. This means your options on the receiving end are extremely limited, and results in a feeling of the game happening to you, rather than you participating equally with your opponent, especially combined with the other elements of LRL - automatic casting, automatic dispels, doubling your CP costs, etc. I don't care whether I can still win that game or not, that's just a matter of tuning numbers - but I wouldn't suddenly enjoy Sentinels if their damage went down by 50%, it would still be equally lame to me the way they ignore all the rules of the game. 

You just don't buy it, and have basically settled on some version of  "it doesn't matter that it's non-interactive, that's what competitive gaming is all about, all that matters if whether you can still win." But that's talking across one another - that isn't anything to do with what I find unenjoyable about the experience.   We can discuss it till the cows go home, it isn't going to shift anyone's position because we have different fundamental assumptions about what matters in a game. I mean look at your question here: you're not interested in the actual "why" of how I feel, you're interested in probing whether my feeling is "correct" or not. That's talking across one another. From my rubric of game design, my lack of enjoyment of something (assuming it is representative of players as a whole and not just an individual quirk) is a problem regardless of whether I'm "correct" or "just emoting." 

In other words, if we had high quality survey data showing that a large number of players found Sentinels unfun to play against and that it was adversely impacting their enjoyment of the game, in my view, that itself is a reason they need to be changed. To you, it would be literally irrelevant based on what you've said here. That's a fundamental disconnect that isn't going to be bridged by talking over whether those feelings are "just emoting." 

Edited March 9, 2021 by yukishiro1

[whispersofblood]

11 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

But this just isn't true, and is what I'm talking about. I've spent literally pages of text in this thread explaining the why, which comes down to a lack of agency. Sentinels cover 90% or more of the table with their threat range, they ignore line of sight, and they effectively ignore to hit modifiers,  to wound modifiers, and armor saves. This means your options on the receiving end are extremely limited, and results in a feeling of the game happening to you, rather than you participating equally with your opponent, especially combined with the other elements of LRL - automatic casting, automatic dispels, doubling your CP costs, etc. I don't care whether I can still win that game or not, that's just a matter of tuning numbers - but I wouldn't suddenly enjoy Sentinels if their damage went down by 50%, it would still be equally lame to me the way they ignore all the rules of the game. 

You just don't buy it, and have basically settled on some version of  "it doesn't matter that it's non-interactive, that's what competitive gaming is all about, all that matters if whether you can still win." But that's talking across one another - that isn't anything to do with what I find unenjoyable about the experience.   We can discuss it till the cows go home, it isn't going to shift anyone's position because we have different fundamental assumptions about what matters in a game. I mean look at your question here: you're not interested in the actual "why" of how I feel, you're interested in probing whether my feeling is "correct" or not. That's talking across one another. From my rubric of game design, my lack of enjoyment of something (assuming it is representative of players as a whole and not just an individual quirk) is a problem regardless of whether I'm "correct" or "just emoting." 

In other words, if we had high quality survey data showing that a large number of players found Sentinels unfun to play against and that it was adversely impacting their enjoyment of the game, in my view, that itself is a reason they need to be changed. To you, it would be literally irrelevant based on what you've said here. That's a fundamental disconnect that isn't going to be bridged by talking over whether those feelings are "just emoting." 

First of all. Let's take a deep breath here, we have the same goal ultimately. I may come across like we are talking across each other but maybe you aren't interpreting what I am asking correctly, or I need to say it a different way. You may feel I'm being dismissive by addressing you feelings as feelings but I am not. Many technical problems are first encountered as a feeling. But knowing what to do about it requires some investigation beyoud validation, as many things that make us feel bad are in fact quite necessary for the functioning of the whole.

I am very clear as to what is causing you to feel like you aren't having fun. And, you've given another very detailed explanation of what is happening. That isn't what I am asking you.

There is fundamentally two questions. The first is what is the feeling percisely? Boredom? Frustration or powerlessness? 

The second is I'm why what is happening casually results in that feeling? Otherwise it's just synchronicity which isn't sufficient grounds for taking action.

These are important things to consider because it tells us what to do. Several posters on both sides of the argument have already articulated it isn't a damage problem per se, so points won't be the solution. So it's probably a warscroll problem which means we need to determine if something needs to be done. And then determine if there is a less triggering way for Sentinels to do the job they are designed to do. Or if we need a tweak to the core rules, or etc etc.

I understand your point, I'm trying to discuss what if anything should be done about it. Apologies if you've been made to feel like I haven't awknowledged that.

[MitGas]

Yeah, aren't you the one that whines about flamers (which are far less problematic) and yet finds Sentinels okay? Arguments are all over the place.

[whispersofblood]

1 minute ago, MitGas said:

Yeah, aren't you the one that whines about flamers (which are far less problematic) and yet finds Sentinels okay? Arguments are all over the place.

I don't actually have a problem with flamers though... I just acknowledge they are strong and consistently so which is why they win tournaments. If you can quote me where I said Flamers are problematic I would appreciate it? Again the questions here isn't about the strength or power its about specifying what the NPE is, and why they are causally linked.