AoS3 - The points discussion

[yukishiro1]

So here's the thing: the reason so much of feedback to GW is negative and not polite is that the company makes no real recognition that it listens to any of it. People shout into a void because, well, they're shouting into a void. Nobody shouts into a void politely, because they don't know that someone is even on the other end listening. People are polite to other people, not to faceless corporate behemoths. 

If GW had better lines to communication to the players, a release like this wouldn't happen in the first place - not without the sort of caveat I mentioned a few posts ago, admitting that the points are a big work in process and likely to be seriously flawed in places, and soliciting constructive feedback. And if that was what they did, I guarantee you the response would be way more constructive. 

But that isn't how GW operates. For whatever reason, humility and recognition of errors is not something GW does naturally. Even when correcting explicit, unambiguous mistakes, you'll notice they almost never actually admit any sort of fault. The only time I can remember them doing it is with Iron Hands, and even then it was a passive-aggressive sort of "well we knew they were overpowered but thought it was better to wait to see just how much before making changes" kind of admission.

I mean look at the recent Sisters book. They released a book with units that were supposed to be 80 points each and reduce incoming damage by 1 point to a minimum of 1...as 240 point per model units that reduce damage by 1 with no minimum, meaning they're immune to damage 1 weapons. When it became obvious what they had done, did they immediately fix it with a FAQ? No. Did they even acknowledge the issue with a post somewhere to let people know they were aware and that it wasn't intentional? No. Instead: radio silence. Nothing. Nada. It will be fixed in the new FAQ with no sort of admission of fault, just like 10 point Reavers in the DE Book - another typo - were fixed without any sort of admission of fault. 

GW actively creates negativity in its relationship with its fans with the attitude it takes towards interacting with us. 

 

[Doko]

Maybe slanesh got these nerfs because free sumon is even more broken next edition than old,and slanesh is the best faction of tye game free sumoning even units of 30 beyond everyone cap on reinforcements.

I am not saying these increases for slanesh are rigth,but maybe gw had a logic for it

[Xil]

2 minutes ago, Doko said:

Maybe slanesh got these nerfs because free sumon is even more broken next edition than old,and slanesh is the best faction of tye game free sumoning even units of 30 beyond everyone cap on reinforcements.

I am not saying these increases for slanesh are rigth,but maybe gw had a logic for it

My buddy and i thought points were actually fine for AoS2. He had almost won 100% of his games with Slaneesh due to the summoning. He even beat LRL (yeah he was lucky rolling double 6 on dispells a few times).

What made him win was a calculated approach to how much damage he would inflict and how much he could receive. He was stacking depravity so fast and summoning 20 Deamonette blobs each round that you just couldnt keep up with the killing.

 

How the recent points influence this is up in the open tho. Smaller board surley helps them archers chipping earlier in the game tho.

[Ggom]

@yukishiro1 while I think it would be amazing to have actual dialogue between consumers and producers I can't imagine how that works on a large scale like GW's. As we zoom out into faceless masses and a faceless corporation, we end up with irresponsible ****** talking on our side and dont-give-a-damn on theirs. Somehow this feels like a natural product of mass production though, created by the scale of peoples and forces at play. 

[Rachmani]

@yukishiro1 The thing is, though, as of now, the release hasn’t happened. All we‘ve seen is a preview of a book done months ago. 
I agree, that more communication, as in „we‘ll drop a FAQ on release day“ would be commendable, but that’s kinda it.

We can bring the pitchforks when there was no FAQ - or even better, after we‘ve played some games.

 

Edited June 19, 2021 by Rachmani

[yukishiro1]

It's not even about communication so much as about an attitude of owning and admitting your errors. GW never, ever does this. No matter how badly it screws something up, any fix is presented as an improvement we should all be grateful for GW bestowing on us in their benevolence, rather than as an error that GW had a responsibility to correct. 

If GW had cultivated a reputation for owning its mistakes, people would interact with the company in a very different way than they do. The reason people get so exasperated is because they see GW doing the same thing over and over and over again. The books ( (40k more than AOS, to be fair) are filled with typos and mistakes caused by a lack of sufficient proofreading, and we never get any acknowledgement that that isn't acceptable. The points for new editions are usually like throwing darts at a board blindfolded, but we never get a statement from GW that it recognizes how it's not very good at doing this. Etc etc.

If you had a co-worker that behaved the way GW did, they'd have you tearing your hair out. Not so much from the errors themselves, as from the not admitting they'd done anything wrong, and then acting like they'd done you some big favor by correcting their own mistakes. 

 

 

Edited June 19, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Clan's Cynic]

35 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

It's not even about communication so much as about an attitude of owning and admitting your errors. GW never, ever does this. No matter how badly it screws something up, any fix is presented as an improvement we should all be grateful for GW bestowing on us in their benevolence, rather than as an error that GW had a responsibility to correct. 

Radio silence works for them. 8th Edition and AoS being successful at all showed GW that people are all too ready, willing, if not desperate to forgive them for any and all mistakes they've made, or continue to make and the bar to improvement is held so low for GW that it could be buried beneath the ground.

One only needs to look at the price hike a week before 9th was announced, the angry forum threads of "this is it, I'm priced out!" only for hundreds of those same people to start loudly exclaiming they were pre-ordering at least one box of Indomitus a week later.

 

Edited June 19, 2021 by Clan's Cynic

[NauticalSoup]

On 6/18/2021 at 6:20 AM, RuneBrush said:

There may be a monsterous arcanum update coming along and possibly a legends at some point.  One big issue with people doing reveals of preview copies is that they only have a portion of what's going to be released.

Is there some basis for either of these claims or just wild speculation? 

Edited June 19, 2021 by NauticalSoup
Quotes the wrong bit

[yukishiro1]

2 hours ago, Rachmani said:

@yukishiro1 The thing is, though, as of now, the release hasn’t happened. All we‘ve seen is a preview of a book done months ago. 
I agree, that more communication, as in „we‘ll drop a FAQ on release day“ would be commendable, but that’s kinda it.

We can bring the pitchforks when there was no FAQ - or even better, after we‘ve played some games.

 

This is why past practice is so important. If GW was in the habit of owning up to mistakes and correcting errors in its publications in a timely fashion, people might give them the benefit of the doubt, even without GW posting a "we know there's issues guys, don't worry, they'll be fixed in a day-1 FAQ." But that would be totally out of character. It took them a month to fix the points costs for Reavers, something that literally only required changing a 1 to a 2 in one place in the document. And again, even when they did it, there was no acknowledgment they had messed up, and it was presented as a "check out these exciting changes we made because we love you so much!" not "our bad guys, this was a really embarrassing error and we'll do our best not to repeat it." And then the same thing happens with the very next book...which they didn't fix with a day-1 FAQ either.

GW hasn't earned the right for people to give it the benefit of the doubt. So that's why communication is doubly important. If there is a big day-1 FAQ coming for AOS 3.0, they should be trumpeting that from the rooftops, not maintaining complete radio silence. 

As relates to AOS points...we literally had them drop the ball last time and tell us there would be no changes at all, because <reasons>, and to wait another 6 months. And now we wait...and we get something that's very hard to make any sort of sense of in many places, with no explanation for the bits that seem to make no sense. It's no surprise people are feeling confused and annoyed, and there's only so many times you can tell someone "just have faith, this time it'll be different" before they stop believing it. 

Edited June 19, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Lord Veshnakar]

4 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

So here's the thing: the reason so much of feedback to GW is negative and not polite is that the company makes no real recognition that it listens to any of it. People shout into a void because, well, they're shouting into a void. Nobody shouts into a void politely, because they don't know that someone is even on the other end listening. People are polite to other people, not to faceless corporate behemoths. 

If GW had better lines to communication to the players, a release like this wouldn't happen in the first place - not without the sort of caveat I mentioned a few posts ago, admitting that the points are a big work in process and likely to be seriously flawed in places, and soliciting constructive feedback. And if that was what they did, I guarantee you the response would be way more constructive. 

 

I am going to say something that is quite likely very controversial here but I think GW in fact are listening. I'll tell you a little story so bear with me. Back when the Fireslayer's points first came around during the beginnings of AOS they weren't exactly unplayable, but they were absolutely an afterthought competitively and most games were an uphill battle against anything remotely hard. There was a lot of internal balance that needed to occur within the fyrelayers battletome's points. I had noticed that within the Fyreslayers community that there was a lot of complaints about the points but never a lot of  effort to provide solutions for what to do about it. 

Back when I played Dark Elves in 6th edition, they were considered absolute bottom of the pile, and I was a member of the Druchii.net team that put forth the changes to GW that got the points cost revision for the Dark Elves back in 6th Edition of WHFB, and they listened.  So I had an idea.  I would go through the points for Fyreslayers and start playing around with changing the points to be more appropriate for what I felt was more internally balanced, to promote a little more choice and list variety. I internally playtested it in my group of 8 friends that I regularly played with. Well after around 40 or so games I refined it even further and posted my results to the Fyreslayers group and asking for feedback, and I got a TON. After the community reached a consensus, I wrote up a small few words and sent it to GW via their community email. It was maybe the VERY NEXT white dwarf and they had posted the points revision for Fyreslayers. It was quite literally that simple.

 

So long story short, I absolutely do think GW is listening. I think a large part of the problem though is that people love to complain and harp on the designers without putting forth ANY sort of collected solution to fix the problem. To make them the big bad money hungry corporate industry that destroyed WHFB. People will put a considerable amount of time into complaining about how and army has been destroyed by these newest GHB points changes, but will put ZERO effort into providing a solution as a community for what they feel is more appropriate.

And I know the typical response, because I faced it during the playtesting for the Dark Elves and Fyreslayers. "Its not my job to write the rules, I pay for a product" etc etc. And that's all well and good. But I don't feel it's right to paint this narrative that GW isn't listening. "Hedonites are so underpowered now, fix HoS GW! I'm shelving my army!" isn't any sort of solution though. We all have forum and facebook community groups for the armies we play. If we more regularly got together and provided solutions I think you and many others would be pleasantly surprised.

Edited June 19, 2021 by Lord Veshnakar

[yukishiro1]

I think that's a deeply unfair and inaccurate summary. To take your HoS example, on this very forum you've seen people spending a lot of time and energy on sussing out the feeling of the community and coming up with proposed solutions. I think it would have been hard for you to choose a more inapplicable example to try to illustrate your point about people simply being whiners. 

As for the claim that you got the Fyreslayers points changed by sending in an email and then in the very next white dwarf they fixed the points for you...(1) that's not how publications work, those are planned out far in advance, the fact that it happened in the next white dwarf itself means it couldn't have been responding to you, it was just a coincidence, and (2) don't you think if they really changed the points because of you, they would have told you that? I mean, wouldn't that have been the decent thing to do if they really did make changes based on all that hard work and effort you put in - to at least acknowledge that it was your work that changed their mind?

This goes back to communication and owning up to mistakes again: if GW is listening, they sure aren't telling people they're listening. "You email us your solutions to fix our game for us, maybe we'll take them, maybe we won't, but we certainly won't deign to tell you if you do, and there's no way we'll ever admit we made a mistake in the first place" is exactly the sort of thing that puts peoples' noses out of joint and causes them to just yell into the void. 

A constructive relationship is a two-way street. GW unfortunately has not historically shown any real desire to engage in the sort of bidirectional communication necessary to cultivate a productive collaborative relationship with the fans. Not even with their own hand-picked playtesters, ironically - when you listen to playtesters talk about their experience, one of the fascinating things is that the communication is still unidirectional there - they just get sent rules, they play with them, they send back their feedback...and that's it. There's no direct communication, there's no direct back-and-forth. It's still message in a bottle stuff. The GW development team might as well be up on a cloud somewhere. 

Contrast this with something like the approach CA takes to running Total War: Warhammer, and it's quite stark. CA has its issues as a company too, but one thing they are much better at doing is fostering a dialogue with the community, especially when it comes to balance issues. The CA Devs responsible for balancing their Warhammer game are constantly engaged in dialogue with the community. They may not always do what people want, but there's not the sense that they're God up on a cloud, or a black box you're never, ever allowed a glimpse inside. 

Edited June 19, 2021 by yukishiro1

[RuneBrush]

50 minutes ago, NauticalSoup said:

Is there some basis for either of these claims or just wild speculation? 

We got an update to them after AoS 2 came out.  It's speculation but wouldn't have called it wild 🤷‍♂️

[Xil]

Hmmm, i once wrote a multipage suggestion on how to balance Craftworlds for 40k to better represent the lore while being a balanced internal and external Codex...

 

i haven't ever heared anything again. Maybe....maybe if there will ever come a new release for models and codex Craftworld...just maybe then i can see if they picked up on some ideas.

[Lord Veshnakar]

46 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

I think that's a deeply unfair and inaccurate summary. To take your HoS example, on this very forum you've seen people spending a lot of time and energy on sussing out the feeling of the community and coming up with proposed solutions. I think it would have been hard for you to choose a more inapplicable example to try to illustrate your point about people simply being whiners. 

As for the claim that you got the Fyreslayers points changed by sending in an email and then in the very next white dwarf they fixed the points for you...(1) that's not how publications work, those are planned out far in advance, the fact that it happened in the next white dwarf itself means it couldn't have been responding to you, it was just a coincidence, and (2) don't you think if they really changed the points because of you, they would have told you that? This goes back to communication: if GW is listening, they sure aren't telling people they're listening. 

So they did tell me that they got my points to the design team. I had that email but it's long gone at this point. Kevin Chin, member of the Fyreslayer group and the artist responsible for a lot of the Fyreslayer artwork including the badass one of Grimnir vs Vulcatrix, even reached out to me and said he was thrilled about it after the fact.

You can see in the attached images where/when I posted on the Fyreslayers facebook group about the points changes on 1/28/2017. This link below was the next Warhammer Community post that came out also linked below. Of all of the armies that had points in AOS that had points out of whack you are saying its coincidence that the very next community post that came out had the adjustments for Fyreslayers in there identical to what we proposed almost two weeks later? The same thing happened with the Druchii.net revision for the Dark Elves' points. 

First Post I made

https://ibb.co/FzSd01H

Second Post I made
https://ibb.co/D14Sh5b

 

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2017/02/07/the-generals-handbook-ii-wip-points-sneak-peek/

 

 

 

Edited June 19, 2021 by Lord Veshnakar

[yukishiro1]

You initially said the points appeared in a white dwarf immediately afterward - hence my comment that it couldn't possibly have been in response to what you did, because of the timeline for publishing those things.

That warhammer community post is really interesting to see - I didn't play AOS back then, but that seems like exactly the sort of community engagement I'm talking about (though even then, if the points changes were prompted by community feedback, why not admit that?). Why do you think they stopped doing that? "Here's some changes we're thinking about, test them out, let us know what you think" is exactly what they need to be doing regularly to cultivate a better relationship. Was it just because AOS was still in its infancy at that stage? Because it's not an approach they've taken in 40k either, the game I have deeper roots in.

On the one hand, I'm encouraged to see that the AOS devs were at one time more transparent than is usual for GW to be...on the other hand, it's frustrating to see they they've moved away from that sort of approach again in recent years. I think if they had kept that up, they'd be in a much healthier place re: engaging with the community. 

Edited June 19, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Lord Veshnakar]

19 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

You initially said the points appeared in a white dwarf immediately afterward - hence my comment that it couldn't possibly have been in response to what you did, because of the timeline for publishing those things.

It was in the next issue of what dwarf as well, not the one for February (that was two days away at the time I posted on Jan 30th) but the March one. I just can't seem to put my hands on that 2017 white dwarf, but it's in there. And these rules were used at a major tournament and then rolled into GHB 2.0 with some minute changes.

All I am saying is that that may not be preaching it quite as much that they are listening, but they are listening. Especially if you get the community for that army involved and create a collective idea, rather than just "here's what I think ___ army's points should look like based on my games with my two friends". 

To your point though there is a bit more radio silence lately in regards to their willingness to accept feedback though. I do still think they are, but I just don't think they are advertising it as much so maybe that's a large part of the disconnect. For example the last KO FAQ that came out, I emailed GW about the status on it and they flat out told me that hadn't received any questions yet so likely weren't even going to roll and FAQ out. The KO group got our community involved and they had 10+ questions in there answered by the end of the week. So yeah maybe they just need to be more open that they are in fact taking feedback. But even when I sent up the Fyreslayer changes, they weren't advertising that they were receptive to feedback. Right now I know they use a lot of internal playtesters in the tournament scene like Russ Veal the Facehammer team etc. 

Edited June 19, 2021 by Lord Veshnakar

[NauticalSoup]

58 minutes ago, RuneBrush said:

We got an update to them after AoS 2 came out.  It's speculation but wouldn't have called it wild 🤷‍♂️

Fair nuff! Hopefully we will again then

Edited June 19, 2021 by NauticalSoup

[Reinholt]

So as someone who has worked a bit in this field (human behavior / product development), I will tell you that there are ultimately three ways to get a company to listen to you, in the end:

1. Vote with your wallet
2. Vote by publicly shaming them for bad performance
3. Vote by supporting them and offering constructive ideas for how to make a better product

Given GW is not exactly a PR titan on the level of, say, Coca-Cola that can effectively respond to most influencers, I would suggest a combination of all three of these things would be ideal. To take Slaanesh, as an example, a three-pronged approach would be as follows if they are now a sub-30% win rate faction that is the equivalent of a Blood Bowl joke team but for an ostensibly balanced game:

1. Stop buying them, and make sure to tell GW you aren't buying them because they are substandard
2. Get influencers to comment negatively on them; in an ideal world you have videos at the top of the stack on youtube advising people not to buy or play them, you have them being banned from the tournament scene because they distort the meta by being uncompetitive and being "free wins" for whomever draws them, and you have the general "meta" knowledge of them being just don't. Get the forums to lock all Slaanesh threads with a note that discussion is banned until GW fixes them. Ban painting/art/discussion of the book. The ultimate nuclear bomb is if you advise new people to literally not play the game vs. play Slaanesh.
3. You also write to GW, or have major influencers and tournament personalities, speak out on what could be done to improve them. "Here are the key weaknesses, here is why this book doesn't work". Have them ask for replacements, directly, and offer to help in that process. Put open source statements on all videos about improving them so GW can use the ideas without fear of any IP issues. And so on.

Basically, in addition to the refusal to give pounds/dollars/dollarydoos, you use the carrot and the stick to get a company to change their behavior. I have a feeling this kind of thing would be effective at getting through to GW precisely because when a high intensity campaign that influences people emerges among consumers, companies HAVE to respond. New Coke was rolled back for a reason. I think, in many ways, with the greater influence of people on YouTube and in the community as the internet spreads, if there's a real consensus problem, people don't throw their weight around enough to say "your product is garbage, do better, but if you do better, we will support you".

Edited June 19, 2021 by Reinholt

[Enoby]

1 minute ago, Reinholt said:

• Stop buying them, and make sure to tell GW you aren't buying them because they are substandard
• Get influencers to comment negatively on them; in an ideal world you have videos at the top of the stack on youtube advising people not to buy or play them, you have them being banned from the tournament scene because they distort the meta by being uncompetitive and being "free wins" for whomever draws them, and you have the general "meta" knowledge of them being just don't.
• You also write to GW, or have major influencers and tournament personalities, speak out on what could be done to improve them. "Here are the key weaknesses, here is why this book doesn't work". Have them ask for replacements, directly, and offer to help in that process. Put open source statements on all videos about improving them so GW can use the ideas without fear of any IP issues. And so on.

 I think all of your suggestions are great, but I think the issue with Slaanesh at the moment is that we tried all of these

Note, very importantly, there is a good chance that the points were already in place before all of the feedback was sent.

We conducted a survey to ask Slaanesh players what they thought of the points and rules, getting 300 responses and compiling them in a polite email to GW. At least one member got a response to say it has been seen (but nothing specific, understandably) 

We've also heard reports that, as least in LGSs, Slaanesh hasn't sold well and the shop owners are almost certain it's because of the rules. I'm unsure if these shop owners have contacted GW, but it was mentioned in the survey with many people saying they didn't buy Slaanesh or didn't buy as much Slaanesh as they would have due to the rules or points. There were also many (100+) attached comments too expressing these concerns.

Finally, the vast majority of popular members of the AoS community (as in, influencing members) have spoken negatively (or at least very luke-warmly) of the Slaanesh points and also their rules. If you search on YouTube for the new Slaanesh models, nearly all videos will mention them being controversial at best, or just bad at worst. While I may not agree with some of these videos, the public facing community reception is very poor.

So we've had polite community feedback, voting with wallets, and influencers even before the AoS 3 points hikes.  

Again, I'll stress that these hikes may have happened before the Slaanesh book was available to the general public, but this is more to explain the feeling in the community. 

I suppose, to best sum it up, it's like trying everything and still failing - in fact, worse than failing as we've ended up in a worse position. I don't think this was malicious (I think poor timing and being far too overly cautious is likely), but people are so upset because we've tried everything we can and it still seems like GW isn't listening. If they'd have assured us of an FAQ to revise the points, we'd be happy, but for now it's radio silence.   

The general community, tournament scene, and influencers were sending out the same message that Slaanesh was struggling, and GW have replied with the exact opposite answer of what was hoped. 

I hope this helps contextualise some things on the Slaanesh front

[Reinholt]

4 minutes ago, Enoby said:

 I think all of your suggestions are great, but I think the issue with Slaanesh at the moment is that we tried all of these

 

We've tried like 10% of this. You have to get Honest Wargamer on a hardcore campaign to ban Slaanesh in all tournaments, get the LVO to stop allowing them, get this forum itself to lock the entire Slaanesh forum except for a single "how to fix Slaanesh" thread, spam Youtube and GW's twitter and social media with comments about them, and literally pay for billboards (cheaper than one thinks!) talking ****** about GW for being so dumb they can't fix them.

 

I used to work at an investment bank. What we do is downright polite and kind; nobody is getting a mob together and storming GW's lobby and breaking everything.

Edit: Yet? To be clear not recommending the mob but also didn't want the internet to dunk on me by having this happen just after I wrote it so heading karma off at the pass.

Edited June 19, 2021 by Reinholt

[shinros]

5 minutes ago, Enoby said:

snip

Who knows, I hope so at least, plus GW might have taken your messaging into account if they're going to revise things for the FAQ(so far they haven't made me hopeful), I hate saying this now, but we have to wait and see what happens and then react accordingly. In the case of keeping up the pressure if no changes are made. As been mentioned, communication would help a lot in this regard, a simple "I hear you," or "x faction hasn't been forgotten," would go a long way to alleviate concerns. 

Edited June 19, 2021 by shinros

[Fyrenn]

30 minutes ago, Reinholt said:

 

We've tried like 10% of this. You have to get Honest Wargamer on a hardcore campaign to ban Slaanesh in all tournaments, get the LVO to stop allowing them, get this forum itself to lock the entire Slaanesh forum except for a single "how to fix Slaanesh" thread, spam Youtube and GW's twitter and social media with comments about them, and literally pay for billboards (cheaper than one thinks!) talking ****** about GW for being so dumb they can't fix them.

 

I used to work at an investment bank. What we do is downright polite and kind; nobody is getting a mob together and storming GW's lobby and breaking everything.

Edit: Yet? To be clear not recommending the mob but also didn't want the internet to dunk on me by having this happen just after I wrote it so heading karma off at the pass.

I mean, that's all well and good but it's also not always practical.

This is a miniature game, so it's hard to really cause a public outcry in the same way as other, much more controversial stances by companies/individuals/etc.  I think it's fair that the Slaaneshi folk did try, and it would be very surprising to me if GW didn't know about this.

I think the frustration I see is, as usual, a lack of communication. The weird thing is many companies are VERY social savvy and nip these things in the butt, because it is, in general, good practice to do so.  If anything, the posts earlier about how they were more responsive two years ago is even more worrying because of a decision to ... not?

This might be comparing apples to oranges, but my wife worked for Jetblue (an Airline here in the USA) for many years - when I went to their corporate office, they literally have a huge board with twitter that shows what people are saying. They have folks in a department that respond pretty quickly if there are issues - like if you've ever heard of someone who was an influencer sort or someone with a lot of twitter followers saying that a plane was delayed and everyone is hungry and suddenly they send over 50 pizzas... that sort of thing.

I don't think it's the rules, or the points - and the other poster even said - it's VERY possible they did get the comments / feedback and just haven't implemented them yet until the faq.  It's mindboggling that they decide it's better to ignore it / not get in front of it / let outsiders (influencers) review the points without the base explanation.  Even in January, they released a little missive saying "sorry guys, we aren't doing points in the Jan FAQ.. I know some of you needed it or expected it, but we don't have enough to go on so it'll have to wait. Don't worry, we'll do one for GHB!)

They could easily have done a similar one here - "A lot has changed and i'm sure you have a ton of questions! We will be rolling out a general and battletome based faq's as soon as possible to address rule changes, point adjustments, and so on".

My logic for saying something more then "A faq is coming" is if they know no points are going to be adjusted in the faq, they really shouldn't leave the community to have half upset and half saying 'wait for the faq'. If that's going to lead to disappointment, just say so - We're in a new edition and it's going to take some time to adapt. There will be additional faqs as needed throughout the year as we all adjust. yadda yada.

It's not, in my opinion, difficult - nor is it costly - and while some people will never be satisfied, a little transparency, without being all that transparent, can go a LONG way to make a lot of people just feel.... heard?

Ah well. Not a rumor.  Best i've seen on the forum in the past day or so was the person who said the faqs all came out 2 days after the indomitus preorder.  if we had a huge amount of faqs coming next week, man, that would be welcome news.

 

[Overread]

Just remember these points won't take into account any feedback from the Slaanesh feedback already provided. These were sent to the printer months ago. It takes months for shipments to make it by boat around the world even before the pandemic slowed down international trade. The Slaanesh feedback might well be part of what contributes toward an errata or FAQ document, but might also be invalid by virtue of being based on the 2.0 not 3.0 system. If anything Slaanesh players should treat it as a dry run - learn from what they collated and tabulated and work to improve a second attempt once 3.0 has been release for a few weeks/month or so so that they can approach it with fresh eyes. Then collate and present the evidence again in the light of the new edition 

[Zappgrot]

6 hours ago, Lord Veshnakar said:

So they did tell me that they got my points to the design team. I had that email but it's long gone at this point. Kevin Chin, member of the Fyreslayer group and the artist responsible for a lot of the Fyreslayer artwork including the badass one of Grimnir vs Vulcatrix, even reached out to me and said he was thrilled about it after the fact.

You can see in the attached images where/when I posted on the Fyreslayers facebook group about the points changes on 1/28/2017. This link below was the next Warhammer Community post that came out also linked below. Of all of the armies that had points in AOS that had points out of whack you are saying its coincidence that the very next community post that came out had the adjustments for Fyreslayers in there identical to what we proposed almost two weeks later? The same thing happened with the Druchii.net revision for the Dark Elves' points. 

First Post I made

https://ibb.co/FzSd01H

Second Post I made
https://ibb.co/D14Sh5b

 

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2017/02/07/the-generals-handbook-ii-wip-points-sneak-peek/

 

 

 

80 points hearthgaurd beserkers?   Seems fair.  I mean they only have double the dammage of comparable units like liberators and ardboys.  And a ward save. It makes total sense that they should be 15 points cheaper.  Also the ability to make them strike first and the fact that they have 2 inch reach should not impact thier point cost at all to i guess.  Serriusly.  PS I play fireslayers.  edit --> So by now i noticed that this was the first editon of the  battle tome. And that makes it much more reasonable.  So my appologies 

Edited June 20, 2021 by Zappgrot

[thubivision]

I get that the new points can be disappointing, but boy do I have a lot of empathy for the GW designers. I’m a video game designer who works on the best selling fps franchise (three words, hesitant to fully out myself). On multiple releases I’ve both been in charge of tuning weapons and managing/leading the person tuning weapons.

I’ve been reading the multiple threads around here and am sort of getting PTSD. I’m just gonna train of thought, so apologies for the rambling. Also, I’m not trying to minimize or take away from anybody’s feelings. I’ve been playing WHFB since 5th edition and 40k since 3rd; I know how bad it feels when the rules change from under you and makes your army not as good as it was.

I have no idea how GW works, but where I work, the community guys are pretty separate from the designers, both physically and with day to day stuff. When they come to design with questions or clarifications, it’s usually a pain for the designer to take the time to try and justify/explain why things are they way they are. There’s also a “once bitten twice shy” that can come from trying to interact with the community (even through an intermediary).

So once we have a game go live, the community guys will trawl the internet and come up with concerns the community has and try to get responses from design. One thing that the feedback almost universally has in common is that none of it comes from looking at the game holistically and trying to better the game as a whole. Any feedback or suggestion originates from a variation of “I use thing X, and thing Y just beat me. It couldn’t possibly be my fault, so thing Y is too powerful and/or thing X is too weak.”

Another issue is that things that may seem simple or quick from the outside aren’t. I saw something in one of these threads about incorrect points in a 40k codex with the comment of “all they had to do was change one number in one document and put out a FAQ.” I get how it could seem like that, but with a big company it’s anything but. Pushing changes can be pricey, so there’s a desire to group them together. There’s translators that the documents have to go through. The web guys have to push it live. And that’s only after the changes are made. Presumably before it gets to that point they’re reviewed and, well, tested.

Which probably makes you think of something cynical regarding GW’s play testing. Maybe their process does suck, who knows. I can tell you this from my work experience. We playtest the game every single day for 2-3 years. Dozens of full matches a day. When it gets closer to ship, we have an army of QA testers playing the game. We have open Alphas and Betas. During all of this we collect data to analyze and make informed decisions. Roughly 10 minutes after the game goes live, there’s literal orders of magnitude more data than we generated in the entire dev cycle. This alone can expose things that nobody else noticed and may seem super obvious in hindsight.

Perceived strength/weakness is also a real thing that can cloud people’s eyes from reality. I’ve severely nerfed overpowered weapons and not seen usage drop. Conversely, I’ve made weak weapons completely broken OP and not seen usage move. And this is with spending a lot of time to create meticulously detailed patch notes to communicate those changes (add another to the “why bother?” column.) Once a community believes something to be at a certain strength, it’s hard to dislodge that no matter what changes. I suspect that competent Hedonites players will be very successful as their opponents won’t have a lot of experience against them and will underestimate their strengths. More-so if points are adjusted down.

Anyway, I feel bad for the designers. I think the worst feeling in the world is going on a forum for a game you poured your heart into, for a game you missed your kids’ bedtimes for, to see how people like it but instead find people calling you incompetent, getting literal death threats, having your work equated to dropping a hydrogen bomb on a developing nation. And for reasons like that, over my 18 year career, I’ve grown to resent the fans. Maybe not resent, but I certainly don’t feel the need to justify my decisions when no matter what you do/say people will be jerks about it. Not everyone is terrible, but there’s a reason people say that a bad apple spoils the bunch. I avoid the internet for about 2 months after a product I work on goes live because I’m just over the abuse.

That’s basically all I have to say. Designers are people and people make mistakes. Nobody is sitting in Nottingham twirling their mustache and celebrating how they f-ed over Slaanesh. The reality is some poor soul probably stuck his head out to see what the reception was to the GHB info getting out and feels awful while double checking his tuning algorithm and scrambling to make changes for a FAQ.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.