Discussing balance in AoS

[wayniac]

2 hours ago, Maogrim said:

GW had a chance to sell me Sylvaneth, but by shaping the faction meta in a way that made the community represent them as disadvantaged I chose another faction. Now, I would assume they still want to sell Sylvaneth, but if other new players think and act like I do, they'll less of them.

And, to make it worse, with GW's backwards logic they will see this and say "Sylvaneth are not selling, we should ignore them" rather than "Sylvaneth are not selling, why and how can we fix it".  So in effect what they are doing is making some armies not sell, which means they will focus on the armies which do sell, leaving the armies which don't sell in even worse states because they think in reverse.

I don't think anyone wants every list to be viable against anything.  A list should have strengths and weaknesses.  But you should absolutely be able to:

A) Pick a faction you like the look/background/anything about and not lose (or be at a significant disadvantage) just for liking that faction above another one

B) Not be stuck with a single "good" build in that faction with everything else being low tier to where, even if the faction is considered good not playing that one build results in the same thing as if you had picked an underpowered faction.

However the problem seems to be either through sheer incompetence or, more likely, deliberately trying to imitate how CCGs work the design team is incapable of doing both of those and, in the rare event they manage to do it, it lasts only as long as they decide to change how they design armies midway through an edition at which point most things before that fall out of favor due to not adapting to the paradigm shift.

As long as people keep putting up with it, it will continue to happen.

Edited April 24, 2021 by wayniac

[Maogrim]

Though, to be fair, from what I've gathered there seem to be quite a lot of armies that are considered S or A tier. Far more than those that are always fighting uphill battles. For me personally it's just a shame that Sylvaneth fall into the latter category.

Please correct me if I've got this wrong. 

[Phasteon]

8 minutes ago, Maogrim said:

Though, to be fair, from what I've gathered there seem to be quite a lot of armies that are considered S or A tier. Far more than those that are always fighting uphill battles. For me personally it's just a shame that Sylvaneth fall into the latter category.

Please correct me if I've got this wrong. 

Nah you are absolutely right and the whole „GW balance is flawed“ - train people happily jump on is just hyperbole.

 

Most people who complain are those that lose a lot. 

Instead of trying to improve or adapt to the game they want the game to adapt to them and they openly admit it! 

They literally write things like „I want to play the army i want the way I want and still be able to win against everyone!“

Its like me saying „I want to play for FC Chelsea as a goalkeeper but I also want to score a lot of goals - but all those other players are just OP and unbalanced because their skills (rules/stats) are just so much better than mine!!“ 
 

Demanding that Fifa makes it so every amateur soccer player can play at every position in every league and still be able to win. 

See how ridiculous this example sounds? 

Edited April 24, 2021 by Phasteon

[pnkdth]

1 minute ago, Phasteon said:

Most people who complain are those that lose a lot. 

 

That isn't true. Some of us simply want this game to become as good as possible, which involves not having easy opponents just because they wanted to start the wrong army, i.e. we want competition and fair play. Sort of like those who stood against ESL because they didn't want a special group people to have an unfair advantage and some having to compete over scraps. The latter part is especially relevant to this discussion.

As for the rest of your post, even the guy you claim believe this has already clarified he doesn't. Yeah, we agree with you. You shouldn't be able to take whatever in whatever combo with no thought behind it. Misunderstanding someone's point is not the end of the world. Let's move on, shall we?

[Maogrim]

I wasn't trying to dismiss any worries about balancing and I wouldn't want to paint anyone who argues that there are balancing issues as a cry baby who needs to 'git gud'.

I just think that it's a good thing that there are so many armies that seem prepared to play on a rather high level.

By the way, I feel like your example is a little flawed because a) FIFA doesn't allocate players to clubs while GW does decide what every army gets and doesn't get and b) there is no minor leagues in Age of Sigmar. All armies are supposed to be played against each other without creatinc NPEs. At least I hope so.

Edited April 24, 2021 by Maogrim

[Phasteon]

8 minutes ago, pnkdth said:

That isn't true. Some of us simply want this game to become as good as possible, which involves not having easy opponents just because they wanted to start the wrong army, i.e. we want competition and fair play. Sort of like those who stood against ESL because they didn't want a special group people to have an unfair advantage and some having to compete over scraps. The latter part is especially relevant to this discussion.

As for the rest of your post, even the guy you claim believe this has already clarified he doesn't. Yeah, we agree with you. You shouldn't be able to take whatever in whatever combo with no thought behind it. Misunderstanding someone's point is not the end of the world. Let's move on, shall we?

I want the same thing as you, I just think GW does a good job at creating just that situation, while others claim GW doesnt. 

And there is no real data that shows either point.

[wayniac]

3 minutes ago, Phasteon said:

I want the same thing as you, I just think GW does a good job at creating just that situation, while others claim GW doesnt. 

And there is no real data that shows either point.

How on earth can you think they do that when even the good armies tend to have only one single way to play if you want them to be good?  Does that not clearly indicate an issue?

[Phasteon]

1 minute ago, wayniac said:

How on earth can you think they do that when even the good armies tend to have only one single way to play if you want them to be good?  Does that not clearly indicate an issue?

Because thats a general „competitive scene issue“ rather than a GW specific issue. 

I run my Fyreslayers as Vostarg with Magmadroths from the beginning and never had any unsolvable problems, although everyone and their mother claims Hermdar is the only way to go.

I just dont play at tournaments, thats about it. 

[azdimy]

2 minutes ago, Phasteon said:

just dont play at tournaments, thats about it. 

If you don t play in tournaments, I wonder how much exposure you really have to other armies and army builds? Your games may be balanced because of the list you play against within you local group but this does not show the big picture which looking at tournament data does and when warhammer weekly can show that the top armies (lrl,idk,seraphon ,tzeentch,dok) have a 70% win rate against any other armies from the tournament data removing the top 25% finishers of the events, we have a real balance issuep

[Phasteon]

1 minute ago, azdimy said:

If you don t play in tournaments, I wonder how much exposure you really have to other armies and army builds? Your games may be balanced because of the list you play against within you local group but this does not show the big picture which looking at tournament data does and when warhammer weekly can show that the top armies (lrl,idk,seraphon ,tzeentch,dok) have a 70% win rate against any other armies from the tournament data removing the top 25% finishers of the events, we have a real balance issuep

I played in like 10-11 different gaming groups and it was pretty much the same everywhere. 

Also played against every army there is. 

So in my personal experience in a „casual“ even „competitive“ local gaming group the game is pretty well balanced. 

[Battlefury]

2 hours ago, Phasteon said:

So in my personal experience in a „casual“ even „competitive“ local gaming group the game is pretty well balanced. 

That might well be, and it is good to hear that the players are apparently on the same level in your community. I would like that too, but unfortunately it isn't like this over here.

Almost 2/3 armies are from Tier a or straight up Tier S here. That's why I claim, that there is a problem within the design of mid tier armies.
I's suggest if all armies where somewhere from Tier S to Tier B, it would be much better. But the armies stretch from S Tier to E Tier.

[Bosskelot]

Not to excuse bad design or balancing attempts, but in a lot of cases in games like this, it is usually individual lists that are a problem rather than entire armies.

I play AoS casually, but keep an eye on its competitive scene. Most of my actual GW wargaming, including competitive attention, is focused on 40k so forgive me for lacking a completely deep knowledge of factions here. But, like, are Seraphon capable of taking less powerful lists and leaning away from obvious power-moves, or is the book just so fundamentally brutal? Even if you don't take Kroak and his Skink world-class wrecking crew, will a random assortment of dinosaurs still just stomp a Khorne or BoC list?

Oftentimes, in 40k at least, when people are talking about strong or OP armies it is very much an incredibly small handful of what the book actually is and so you have the option of avoiding that stuff should you so choose. Not that this is often a good thing, as you get situations like Eldar have often faced in the past few editions where they've had 5% gamebreaking exploitative units, 20% okay-ish models and 75% godawful trash. But of course that tournament reputation precedes them into casual games, where people would (in 8th at least) pre-emptively ****** and moan or assign descriptions of "imbalance" to Iyanden Wraith armies or Biel-Tan Aspect Hosts, despite both of those archetypes being perfectly reasonable armies for a casual game of beer and pretzelhammer.

On the flipside you have had instances of books just being incredibly powerful throughout, to the point where it becomes harder to make a "bad" army. 8.5 Marines and arguably the new Drukhari Codex are sort of in this state (although the Drukhari feel less overwhelmingly unfair, and rather more remarkably strong throughout their book which displays a shockingly well-designed level of internal balance for GW)

Edited April 24, 2021 by Bosskelot

[Golub87]

9 hours ago, Battlefury said:

 

@PhasteonI meant this in detail. I am literally sitting on a 7000 point Khorne collection, that is worth about 1000€ now. Can't play, because it frustrates me to a degree, that it will ruin a whole day if I do. Shouldn't be like that.
Of course I see, that it depends on the local meta. My local meta gives BoK no chance.

And that is one of the key issues with how GW designs armies. They basically make the whole book into a rock or paper or scissors. They also happen to be very careless with how the meta shifts, so if your army is all rocks, and meta favors paper ATM... well you are out of luck.

It is like they have no rules design direction so they tend to overcompensate. "This is a melee army? OK it is 100% melee and nothing else! Shooting army? OK, all shooting then"

This tends to get exacerbated with factions that they clearly have no interest in, like Chaos armies, that tend to be underdesigned (which occasionally slips trough some OP nonsense like Keeper spam and Changehost).

Some pet factions get the opposite treatment and get overdesigned (LRL).

I'd really like to be a fly on the wall for any meeting of the designer team, presuming that they have those. I am really interested if the process is more than just "Hey Jeff! You do the DoK tome, it is due next Tuesday".
 

[Battlefury]

11 minutes ago, Golub87 said:

I'd really like to be a fly on the wall for any meeting of the designer team, presuming that they have those. I am really interested if the process is more than just "Hey Jeff! You do the DoK tome, it is due next Tuesday".
 

AFAIK it is literally 2 guys writing the books.

 

 

28 minutes ago, Bosskelot said:

On the flipside you have had instances of books just being incredibly powerful throughout, to the point where it becomes harder to make a "bad" army.

It is more like this, since the pure warscrolls / stats favor certain play styles and are often very different from army to army. Often I look into a book and see the scrolls and wonder, how they even calculated the point cost.

Certainly they use a formula, that will calculate the point cost. But I would really like to see, wich factors are taken into account by this calculation.

[Charleston]

Many important notes here recently!

10 hours ago, Battlefury said:

And, as I told before, another of my top players did play the army, wnet 8 out of 10 and saied, that the army is worse, than he thought. Before, he was one of them telling me, that the army is good and I just have to play different.

It is also a problem over here. Same stuff goes on on a daily basis. I am 190% sure, that it shouldn't happen. People shall be free to play what they like and have a good chance to win versus other armies, if caertain list compositions are played.

• Peoples opinion on things (in this case balance) always depends on their perspective and their context.
  • From DoK/Lumineth/Seraphon perspective people really like to ****** about rules instead of enjoying the game
  • From Sylvaneth/BoK Perspective the balance is awfull and it is a pure act of masochism to pick up a game
• The big difference between powerfull and useless affects casual players more than competetive ones.
  • A competetive player will learn fast about this fact and will inform about meta and what goes and what not before diving too much in.
  • A casual player who may just have started the game will be crushed if he learns his army he bought (for a quite high price point) and painted with love is just useless and will always be "bad" when playing the game

48 minutes ago, Bosskelot said:

Not to excuse bad design or balancing attempts, but in a lot of cases in games like this, it is usually individual lists that are a problem rather than entire armies.

I really like your point but the comparsion to 40k should be always done with proper caution:

• 40k uses a way more interactive ruleset than AoS due to f.e. relation of S/T in addition to Save/Rend characteristics or the lack of wound-carry-over. Due to this you can't compare all weapon-profiles on the same scale but rather in categories ("Good against MEQ, against GEQ, against Vehicles, etc"). It is really hard to tell if your list is good if you do not know what it will be played against. 
• AoS has a way more minimized interaction. Weapon Profiles can be rated in 1/10 because they kill everything equally good. The only measure of defense is the save characteristic and how many wounds a target has. Your units do not care if they blend 10 infantery or 5 cavallery or 1 monster.

The access to better profiles and more recent rule writing trends really tells a lot about the power of a book. GW tends to write the book over the span of an Edition: They finish one and then process to the next. Due to this designers have weird ideas ("Hey, let Army XY always fight first or always to Mortals") and start spiraling into weird new rules.

33 minutes ago, Golub87 said:

And that is one of the key issues with how GW designs armies. They basically make the whole book into a rock or paper or scissors. They also happen to be very careless with how the meta shifts, so if your army is all rocks, and meta favors paper ATM... well you are out of luck.

I love this metaphor. AoS and it issues can be compared on so many levels to RPS.

19 minutes ago, Battlefury said:

AFAIK it is literally 2 guys writing the books.

This is what some people in the community think, and it is a quite prominent opinion as it is also shared by many content creators. Honest Wargamer had a stream 1-2 weeks ago about Sin/Bin-Battletomes on exactly this topic.

[pnkdth]

I'd like to stick up for GW a bit here. 25 armies + extra armies (Chorfs, LoCA, etc) + expansions. Now add in sub-factions, battalions, allies, relics and traits, and you got the perfect conditions for the player to tinker and find the broken combos. Even the smallest of changes will cause ripples. In a perfect world they'll be able to update and test everything extensively. Though I would not say the game is in shambles either, I really really like it, but it is worth giving constructive criticism so...

All of this takes time, time costs money. My question is, what are we prepared to give up to, subjectively speaking, have better rules? Should they get rid of the unpopular armies? Merge certain tomes and tighten up the schedule (KO + Fyreslayers, SCE + CoS, a single chaos tome, etc)? Perhaps simplify the rules for and update them in a fashion similar to Chorfs? 

Or is it simply enough to have an updated PDF with new points twice a year/each quarter between BT releases?

Edited April 25, 2021 by pnkdth

[Battlefury]

@pnkdthGood questions, I'd like to talk about my opinion a little bit.

I think that it ws a mistake to bring all those Soup possibilities. Allies was the first, that gave people significant potential to create broken combos. Mercenaries came in later, but seemed to not make a vast difference.

The Sub factions themselves within the Battle Tomes are ok. But to be honest, most of those factions are not interesting to play.
I see that most books have that one sub factions in combination with one Battalion and use certain units for that. So I'd suspect it is restricting choice more, than it would give opportunities.

Personally, I'd suggest another idea for the creation of sub factions. It could be possible, that different keywords just get different buffs / possibilities in each faction. But each single unit ( or at least the majority ) would have to be within each sub faction. That would change the role / usage of the units in some ways, could change the point cost too. Could be interesting IMO.
Otherwise it is better to get rid off every sub faction. Therefore, this one single good faction should just become the army standart, maybe.

But bringin more and more possibilities to soup armies, just for the sake of selling books and models, is the wrong way to go. It will be impossible to balance.

The more grinds a watch has, the more of a difference a single change will do to all the others.

[Golub87]

4 hours ago, pnkdth said:

I'd like to stick up for GW a bit here. 25 armies + extra armies (Chorfs, LoCA, etc) + expansions. Now add in sub-factions, battalions, allies, relics and traits, and you got the perfect conditions for the player to tinker and find the broken combos. Even the smallest of changes will cause ripples. In a perfect world they'll be able to update and test everything extensively. Though I would not say the game is in shambles either, I really really like it, but it is worth giving constructive criticism so...

All of this takes time, time costs money. My question is, what are we prepared to give up to, subjectively speaking, have better rules? Should they get rid of the unpopular armies? Merge certain tomes and tighten up the schedule (KO + Fyreslayers, SCE + CoS, a single chaos tome, etc)? Perhaps simplify the rules for and update them in a fashion similar to Chorfs? 

Or is it simply enough to have an updated PDF with new points twice a year/each quarter between BT releases?

Honestly, I feel that the main issue here is that GW feels like every army has to be super unique when it comes to rules. There are so so many games where very slight differences produce dramatically different play-styles for factions. GW just goes overboard. If you want the army to be good at X, you do not have to give insane bonuses to X while disabling Y and Z and yet that is what GW often does. Armies that do well are either armies that are somehow balanced and get those insane bonuses to X while remaining capable in Y and Z or armies whose X is currently favored in the meta.

Everything points to GW not begin confident at all in their design process. The secrecy surrounding it, the hilarious insistence on open play being the default and best game mode and the tendency to overcompensate when it comes faction rules diversity. Secrecy, deflection and overcompensation tell a story when taken together.

I play other games, many of them historic, others fictional. Those games prove that all factions can have access to same tools and that slight variation in degrees of access and effectiveness of those tools can cause for the factions to play very differently while at the same time avoiding the rock-paper-scissors style of AoS.

AoS also needs to slow down and let the players and the match itself breathe. At the moment it is too explosive and it feels more like combo execution game than a tactical wargame. Better game allows for extensive maneuvering and positioning and advantage is something that accumulates over time.

AoS needs to incorporate terrain better in the game. Currently it is a gimmick. You can play a game of AoS without a single piece of terrain on the board and it will still feel and largely function as an AoS game. This is a failing for a tactical game. Terrain in AoS functions as an obstacle course rather than the integral part of the battle. Better game integrates terrain in such a way that it is impossible to imagine playing without it.

AoS needs to differentiate better between roles of various unit types, to make sure that you need every role in every battle (and not just if you roll for that specific scenario where you need heroes and monsters, because that is rock-paper-scissors design) and make sure that every army can bring every role to the table. Better game requires all kinds of units to support each other for the list to be effective.

16 hours ago, Charleston said:

This is what some people in the community think, and it is a quite prominent opinion as it is also shared by many content creators. Honest Wargamer had a stream 1-2 weeks ago about Sin/Bin-Battletomes on exactly this topic.

This is brilliant and I missed it. Thank you for the video. Yeah, it sums up very nicely how the different tomes feel. Two guys, one slacking, other overdoing it, no oversight, calibration or cross-referencing.

16 hours ago, Charleston said:

Many important notes here recently!

• Peoples opinion on things (in this case balance) always depends on their perspective and their context.
  • From DoK/Lumineth/Seraphon perspective people really like to ****** about rules instead of enjoying the game
  • From Sylvaneth/BoK Perspective the balance is awfull and it is a pure act of masochism to pick up a game

I get what you are trying to say here, but I think this is quite the dangerous way to look at things. "Bothsiding" and perspective talk is encouraged and praised in our society precisely because it is a very polite and civil method of stalling. A way to overpower and even kill the discussion without leaving any room to be called out for it.

Aassuming 100% honest actors, if A says "I feel no problem, therefore the problem does not exist" and person B says "I feel the problem, therefore it does exist.", person B is correct 100% of the time and person A is absolutely wrong. A is basically gaslighting here.

As I stated, I played Slaanesh during THOSE days and I shelved the army, so yeah, people do know even if they have different perspective. I am happy that the new book is toned down in power despite the bland and uninteresting design.

Another methods used to derail the talk about the issue is concern trolling - we might ruin something if the changes are made. This makes no sense because if you put such trust in the people who made these, according to you great rules, why are you so concerned about them ruining it? Maybe because you are aware that it really not as good as you claim for it to be, just that it currently favors you, otherwise you would trust the design process.

Another is the Just world hypothesis - the need to believe that the world is just, therefore if bad things happen to someone it is their own fault (i.e. "git gud" argument).

SUPER IMPORTANT - all this written is a reaction to your statement only because I am 100% certain that you are acting in good faith. It is not an attack, just an overview of how easily we internalize the methods of bad faith actors.

This is a conversation about a problem. We have both the lived experiences of people affected and the robust data that pinpoints exactly where the problem is located. The problem is real and there is no two ways about it. Do not provide an alibi and an atmosphere of acceptance to those who would deny it in bad faith. The science is real

Going back to stalling methods - the purpose of the conversation about a specific issue is to reach a conclusion, a consensus. Information and perspective exchanges are presented and widely accepted as the goal, but they are merely the tools, not the ultimate objective of the conversation. Conversation where everyone states their opinion, agrees to disagree and then backs out is a waste of time that did not achieve anything.

Edited April 25, 2021 by Golub87

[Charleston]

41 minutes ago, Golub87 said:

SUPER IMPORTANT - all this written is a reaction to your statement only because I am 100% certain that you are acting in good faith. It is not an attack, just an overview of how easily we internalize the methods of bad faith actors.

Haha thanks mate! Enjoyed your post about the topic! I'm sorry if my prior post looked like an attempt of stalling. Indeed it was rather an attempt of explaining the anechdote about different reactions Battlefury received from other players regarding BoK powerlevel. It's more about sensibilisation of people who are "in the priviledged" position to play a faction that is in the upper part of the meta that the game can be quite unfun for others who have picked up the short one regarding powerlevel

[Marcvs]

5 hours ago, pnkdth said:

All of this takes time, time costs money. My question is, what are we prepared to give up to, subjectively speaking, have better rules?

I will gladly sacrifice path of glory pages from all the battletomes

Mostly, I am prepared for GW to give up a tiny fraction of their impressive margins to hire more people and pay them a decent wage to work on game design.

[pnkdth]

@Golub87 @Battlefury @Marcvs

Interesting to see everyone's takes.

I'm probably more on the side of keeping things more complex, and sometimes unbalance things, since I believe the lore and world-building is important to the game (as in representing on the tabletop not just as a general army but options within). So I really want to keep sub-factions/allegiances since they also serve to give longevity to an army and options if the meta shifts. On a personal note, the ability to represent lore on the tabletop is very important to me. It is the why I come back and care about my armies.

The rumour of 3rd edition is that battalions are going away to be replaced by general battalions. A change like this would further give armies more flexibility and help aiding them when facing more armies. Ensuring one army won't get left in the dust just because of an obsolete tome.

My primary concern is bringing up the stragglers in almost any ways possible. Going forward, I think campaigns like BR could serve as a double duty as a narrative campaign and as more substantial army updates for bottom tier armies. They did it for DoK and LRL (and possibly will for HoS), so it shouldn't be too hard to refine that process for updates. Then with data update though either GHB or just having stuff online.

TL;DR: More frequent updates and adjustments to bottom tier and S armies (which usually means adjusting a certain battalion or sub-faction rather than the whole army).

 

[Golub87]

7 hours ago, Marcvs said:

Mostly, I am prepared for GW to give up a tiny fraction of their impressive margins to hire more people and pay them a decent wage to work on game design.

That is a sacrifice we would all be ready to accept.

[PlasticCraic]

@Golub87 Thanks for posting perhaps the most thoughtful and insightful reply I've seen on this (or any) internet forum.  Bravo!

13 hours ago, Golub87 said:

Another methods used to derail the talk about the issue is concern trolling - we might ruin something if the changes are made. This makes no sense because if you put such trust in the people who made these, according to you great rules, why are you so concerned about them ruining it? Maybe because you are aware that it really not as good as you claim for it to be, just that it currently favors you, otherwise you would trust the design process.

 

[Greybeard86]

I'd also like to question the results from listbot on the contribution of armies to success.

When they pick top players (i.e. high placing players), and compare their performance across armies, finding relatively similar results across armies is NOT a sign of the results being mostly about skill.

Those top placing players are hopping between top armies, what you are finding is how busted some metas where relative to others. There isn't a counterfactual of them using "bad armies" because, for scoring tourneys, they mostly do not bring bad armies.

I am surprised more people aren't using the results collected in listbot to make quantitative arguments about balance.

[whispersofblood]

5 hours ago, Greybeard86 said:

I'd also like to question the results from listbot on the contribution of armies to success.

When they pick top players (i.e. high placing players), and compare their performance across armies, finding relatively similar results across armies is NOT a sign of the results being mostly about skill.

Those top placing players are hopping between top armies, what you are finding is how busted some metas where relative to others. There isn't a counterfactual of them using "bad armies" because, for scoring tourneys, they mostly do not bring bad armies.

I am surprised more people aren't using the results collected in listbot to make quantitative arguments about balance.

You realise ofcourse that your position assumes those players are only using very "strong" armies? Some of these players are using SCE, BoC, GSG and a variety of fat middle feather weights. This argument trends pretty close to @stratigo's perspective that the best players only use the best books and that isn't the case where players are playing multiple armies according to the developer.

It also relatively ordinary to normalize stats for expected result in a dataset. It's pretty easy to see when an individual is outperforming the norm. That is usually refered to as alpha which can be skill, access or an exploit. 

Also I think your use of meta is going to trigger @Sleboda, personally I'm not really sure what you mean by "metas" in this context. 

Lastly it's usually not good faith to argue a algorithm is flawed without using the dataset  to produce results the hasn't been able to identify, as these things can have any number of blind spots but supposition but what we are really looking for is the best answer to our question, not the most complete dataset. ML algorithms frequently find that data humans think is critical is irrelevant and the opposite. 

@Overread I think you understand what I'm saying to a point. At some point I said that "faction strength" should have something like a .3-.4 relationship in the middle. I said this because actually I don't think stratifying the casual gamer to inches of player skill generates a "fun game" for the casual. 

That why having resources like this is so important so that players can *choose* how they interact with the game portion. Let's say after we fix Slyvaneth they are ok but quite difficult to handle. That difficulty to show up as faction strength in this relationship(the graph that upset everyone).

Ironically this is LRL right now. Because the raw damage is so mediocre they post a lot of mediocre results. But they have a lot of rules and whenever that happens the circumstances to combine variables into something greater is always possible. So we end up with a situation where some players are capable of doing absolutely disgusting things to people but most people post mediocre results. 

For me this is fine so long as a person picking it up knows what they are getting themselves in for. The book is decent and a good player or a player dedicated to getting good results will figure it out. But, if you pick it up because some guy locally won an event you are in for a rude awakening.

Now I agree there are lots up books that are much worse than LRL and need work. And, I don't think you believe I'm saying that but this is just for clarity. 

TL;DR faction power as an effect allows a broader a range of skill levels to play against each other and have relatively close/fun games. However, if it runs unchecked then it's basically buy to win in the middle. I don't think we are there at a .6-.4 correlation but .6 is way to high. 

 

 

Edited April 26, 2021 by whispersofblood