New FAQ Discussion Thread (27.08)

[yukishiro1]

It's interesting to me that this FAQ finally pushed a ton of TOs over the line on comping. As far as I can tell, almost everybody is ruling that we're just going to ignore GW's snafu with the ward stacking, because it's either (1) a mistake or (2) such a terrible decision that we have to wrestle responsibility back from GW, because if they really meant to do that, they have no clue how to produce a good game.

It'll be fascinating to see whether this is a one-off, or whether it's opened pandora's box and we're going to see the community comping future broken things as well if GW is either unable or unwilling to fix balance things itself. 

 

[NinthMusketeer]

@Zeblasky I don't want to turn this into a discussion about the preferred use of handgunners last edition, so suffice it to say that while we may have different opinions on what the unit WAS I am certainly on the same page as you with what the unit IS.

And that change does go further to, for me the ability to 'double up' on a command ability in the same phase was what made the free-command-ability core battalions viable. Without that they are just something I'd use only because it's free and I have an extra leader + two artillery sitting around. Between command entourage and the Matched battalions leaders, troops, and behemoths have better places to be.

[AaronWilson]

6 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

It's interesting to me that this FAQ finally pushed a ton of TOs over the line on comping. As far as I can tell, almost everybody is ruling that we're just going to ignore GW's snafu with the ward stacking, because it's either (1) a mistake or (2) such a terrible decision that we have to wrestle responsibility back from GW, because if they really meant to do that, they have no clue how to produce a good game.

It'll be fascinating to see whether this is a one-off, or whether it's opened pandora's box and we're going to see the community comping future broken things as well if GW is either unable or unwilling to fix balance things itself. 

 

We did get a response from one of the team on twitter who said "they were looking into it" so I am expecting a revert to this to simply allow a armour save + one other save. 

[PrimeElectrid]

8 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

It's interesting to me that this FAQ finally pushed a ton of TOs over the line on comping. As far as I can tell, almost everybody is ruling that we're just going to ignore GW's snafu with the ward stacking, because it's either (1) a mistake or (2) such a terrible decision that we have to wrestle responsibility back from GW, because if they really meant to do that, they have no clue how to produce a good game.

It'll be fascinating to see whether this is a one-off, or whether it's opened pandora's box and we're going to see the community comping future broken things as well if GW is either unable or unwilling to fix balance things itself. 

 

At this point I think the community must introduce their own comp. unfortunately it seems that GW cannot be relied upon to produce quality FAQs on time anymore. 

How do we know that OWC and SCE won’t suffer the same fate? At this point it looks like they might not be out until October. We could be waiting until December for an FAQ to these books, which means they they won’t be event legal until January 2022 (due to cut event offs and the absence of events in late December). Worse, these FAQs might also ignore key issues and inadvertently introduce a game wide interaction that significantly warps balance.

Meanwhile the community identifies problems within hours of new rules being published. Community comp could address these issues within days or weeks - not months. There’s no reason we should wait 2 months for GW to deliver something which causes more problems than it addresses.

The problem is of course that community-anything lacks the same authority as one from GW, so how this would be delivered I’ve no idea.

it’s a real shame as GW knocked it out of the park with 3.0 launch with a comprehensive set of FAQs to get into the new edition. However they needed to maintain that support and actually communicate to us what they are doing rather than delivering some thing late and wasting time and effort on updates to legends that 5 people in the world still play. 

Edited September 2, 2021 by PrimeElectrid

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

42 minutes ago, PrimeElectrid said:

Meanwhile the community identifies problems within hours of new rules being published. Community comp could address these issues within days or weeks - not months. There’s no reason we should wait 2 months for GW to deliver something which causes more problems than it addresses.

The problem is of course that community-anything lacks the same authority as one from GW, so how this would be delivered I’ve no idea.

I don't think that establishing a community rule set would be impossible if there was a serious effort to do so. Other competitive games (like fighting games) without a centralized authority behind them do it all the time.

The problem with this kind of thing is more that, in my mind, the community is usally quite good at identifying problems, but not necessarily at fixing them. We are lucky that the ward stacking situation is a really easy one to solve: Just don't let wound negation abilities stack, done! But other problems seem like they would be a lot harder to tackle.

[whispersofblood]

6 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

I don't think that establishing a community rule set would be impossible if there was a serious effort to do so. Other competitive games (like fighting games) without a centralized authority behind them do it all the time.

The problem with this kind of thing is more that, in my mind, the community is usally quite good at identifying problems, but not necessarily at fixing them. We are lucky that the ward stacking situation is a really easy one to solve: Just don't let wound negation abilities stack, done! But other problems seem like they would be a lot harder to tackle.

Exactly this, the comp thing comes up every now and again, even in the WHFB days. But, I think the difficulty of coming to an equitable solution usually just ends up with "you have your thing I hate, and I have my thing you hate" because some of the things the community would want to comp are genuinely unique and interesting things. 

 

[Zeblasky]

14 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

It'll be fascinating to see whether this is a one-off, or whether it's opened pandora's box and we're going to see the community comping future broken things as well if GW is either unable or unwilling to fix balance things itself. 

 

My guess that such things would still happen in the future, but pretty rarely.

But honestly, just recently I was wondering about this. Why community struggle with GW produced rules of quite a fluctuating quality for so, so long? Why not finally stop buying battletomes, say "no, this service is bad, we'll do it ourselfs" and produce a set or sets of partially or competely remade home rules for all factions and subfactions over time and then play by them at most tournaments? Honestly, coming from TW:W competitive scene, where all tournaments are played by their own rules and army caps (mostly by Shetland then Turin approved ruleset), this strikes me as extremely weird. Sure, it would be rough at first, you'll need a year or even two to rewrite and balance everything properly, but it would open doors wide for community feedback and creativity! Both 40k and AoS communities would be free from current sets of problems (most of imbalance, FAQ wait time, steep power creep, etc), rules would be widely available for everyone... And the best part, if this would eventually become mainstream enough, it would force GW as a corporation to invest in much better rules quality in the future. In other words, win-win.

The most obvious question though would be "and how would we organise such rule creation process?" The answer is quite simple - however you'd like! As long as there are a few sets of home rules in circulation, natural selection will choose the best one and the most popular for most tournaments, while still providing alternatives for some. The most logical way though is to get together a small group or interconnected groups of most experienced and well respected players and start from there, probably beggining from the core rules, trying to keep everything as laconically as possible.

 

I also do not believe that GW would try to legally stop such a thing (unless they want to make a really, REALLY bad and probably quite illegal PR move). It would not be a free distribution of their battletomes rules (and they are already in a free access on youtube and some other places anyway), but it would be just a free distribution of free home rules, may be somewhat remade from battletome basis, but remade nonetheless. As long as you'd play it with official models, you should be fine.

 

So, why not?

Edited September 2, 2021 by Zeblasky

[Beliman]

Imho, we are overthinking all this ward-nonward saves adn remember that we already had stacking non-ward saves before (not as powerful as newchaon/nagash but still, it was faq'd later).

We had exactly the same rules in 3.0 before de FAQ, but we just assumed the best, instead of reading how it was worded and prepared for the worst. That's why it seems a big deal. After talking to some TO and friends, it seems that nobody will use more than 1 negation-save, in other words, this rule will have 0 weight on my country....

Btw, Sam Pearson already said that they are going to look at this mess, that's 100% better than  any other issue we had before.

[Sleboda]

8 hours ago, PrimeElectrid said:

At this point I think the community must introduce their own comp. unfortunately it seems that GW cannot be relied upon to produce quality FAQs on time anymore. 

Which community?

Who decides?

How does every member of whichever community gets to decide get ahold of the mandates of said community?

What happens when a player (who spent their cash of the official rules just like everyone else) decides he doesn't like the ruling of some Council of Basement Dudes and, rightly, expects the game to be played by, oh, the actual rules?

 

Not meant to be harsh to you directly, but every time I hear anyone suggest that this multi-thousand member group of individuals can somehow act like it's a single body and replace the rules of the authors, expecting universal acceptance, it makes me both chuckle and shake my head.

 

House rules for your group of six buddies? Sure! Go for it!

Acting like "the community" is ever going to act like a cohesive, agreeable, insightful, intelligent whole? Never gonna happen.

The best approach, in my view, is to continue to express concerns to the manufacturer and to cease purchasing and playing if the direction a game goes in is one you don't like.

To put it differently, what makes any of us believe that our individual (or even small group) opinions on how the game should change to be more the way we want it entitles us to impose that on others?

Comp, community or local, is one of the worst thing that can happen to a player base. It fractures it. Divides it.

It's horrible.

One of the Great Hobby Sins.

Edited September 2, 2021 by Sleboda

[PrimeElectrid]

21 minutes ago, Sleboda said:

Which community?

Who decides?

How does every member of whichever community gets to decide get ahold of the mandates of said community?

What happens when a player (who spent their cash of the official rules just like everyone else) decides he doesn't like the ruling of some Council of Basement Dudes and, rightly, expects the game to be played by, oh, the actual rules?

 

Not meant to be harsh to you directly, but every time I hear anyone suggest that this multi-thousand member group of individuals can somehow act like it's a single body and replace the rules of the authors, expecting universal acceptance, it makes me both chuckle and shake my head.

 

House rules for your group of six buddies? Sure! Go for it!

Acting like "the community" is ever going to act like a cohesive, agreeable, insightful, intelligent whole? Never gonna happen.

The best approach, in my view, is to continue to express concerns to the manufacturer and to cease purchasing and playing if the direction a game goes in is one you don't like.

To put it differently, what makes any of us believe that our individual (or even small group) opinions on how the game should change to be more the way we want it entitles us to impose that on others?

Comp, community or local, is one of the worst thing that can happen to a player base. It fractures it. Divides it.

It's horrible.

One of the Great Hobby Sins.

I mean if you read to the end of my post you’d see that I pointed this out 🤷‍♂️ 

But surely it’s the lesser of two evils at this point. I don’t want to wait another 4 months to play Stormcast at an event only to find out the FAQ breaks something else.

Edited September 2, 2021 by PrimeElectrid

[yukishiro1]

People say how horrible community comp is...but it's already happening. GW screwed up the ward thing so badly that the result has been spontaneous community comp. The vast majority of events have already stated they will be comping it.

If we want to avoid community comp, GW is going to have to get serious about improving the quality of the rules it puts out, because right now, comp is required to make the game playable. 

If you're against comp you ought to be on the front lines demanding GW fix this snafu and up its game generally, because nothing feeds the demand for community comp like incompetent rules writing. 

Edited September 2, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Nizrah]

2 hours ago, Zeblasky said:

My guess that such things would still happen in the future, but pretty rarely.

But honestly, just recently I was wondering about this. Why community struggle with GW produced rules of quite a fluctuating quality for so, so long? Why not finally stop buying battletomes, say "no, this service is bad, we'll do it ourselfs" and produce a set or sets of partially or competely remade home rules for all factions and subfactions over time and then play by them at most tournaments? Honestly, coming from TW:W competitive scene, where all tournaments are played by their own rules and army caps (mostly by Shetland then Turin approved ruleset), this strikes me as extremely weird. Sure, it would be rough at first, you'll need a year or even two to rewrite and balance everything properly, but it would open doors wide for community feedback and creativity! Both 40k and AoS communities would be free from current sets of problems (most of imbalance, FAQ wait time, steep power creep, etc), rules would be widely available for everyone... And the best part, if this would eventually become mainstream enough, it would force GW as a corporation to invest in much better rules quality in the future. In other words, win-win.

The most obvious question though would be "and how would we organise such rule creation process?" The answer is quite simple - however you'd like! As long as there are a few sets of home rules in circulation, natural selection will choose the best one and the most popular for most tournaments, while still providing alternatives for some. The most logical way though is to get together a small group or interconnected groups of most experienced and well respected players and start from there, probably beggining from the core rules, trying to keep everything as laconically as possible.

 

I also do not believe that GW would try to legally stop such a thing (unless they want to make a really, REALLY bad and probably quite illegal PR move). It would not be a free distribution of their battletomes rules (and they are already in a free access on youtube and some other places anyway), but it would be just a free distribution of free home rules, may be somewhat remade from battletome basis, but remade nonetheless. As long as you'd play it with official models, you should be fine.

 

So, why not?

Because it not that easy? Look at the 9th age. Game made completly by "fans". Its totally unbalanced just like GW games. Also there is lack of major authority for Age of Sigmar communities. There was such thing for wfb, it was called "euro" rulespack and it was total cancer. 

[baiardo]

8 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

Exactly this, the comp thing comes up every now and again, even in the WHFB days. But, I think the difficulty of coming to an equitable solution usually just ends up with "you have your thing I hate, and I have my thing you hate" because some of the things the community would want to comp are genuinely unique and interesting things. 

 

Gloomspite are loved by many because they aren't a menace?😄

[NinthMusketeer]

8 hours ago, whispersofblood said:

Exactly this, the comp thing comes up every now and again, even in the WHFB days. But, I think the difficulty of coming to an equitable solution usually just ends up with "you have your thing I hate, and I have my thing you hate" because some of the things the community would want to comp are genuinely unique and interesting things. 

 

Yeah. I did a thread on here recently just showing a few house rule comps for casual play (not even changing any rules) and the response was overwhelmingly toxic. I was immediately accused of just nerfing things I personally didn't like, multiple people popped in to say how much they don't like house rules without even engaging in discussion, and those posts were further reinforced with likes from others. Granted that's just one anecdote, but if that is how people will treat an honest effort to improve the play experience of others it's no surprise there's little will to take action.

[NinthMusketeer]

1 hour ago, Nizrah said:

Because it not that easy? Look at the 9th age. Game made completly by "fans". Its totally unbalanced just like GW games. Also there is lack of major authority for Age of Sigmar communities. There was such thing for wfb, it was called "euro" rulespack and it was total cancer. 

I was able to fix up the classic PtG system just as some dude stacking up house rules for flgs leagues. I wouldn't say it's easy but it is definitely doable. T9A was plagued with issues from the start IIRC but I feel it fell into a classic trap; they forgot to KiSS.

[novakai]

3 hours ago, Zeblasky said:

My guess that such things would still happen in the future, but pretty rarely.

But honestly, just recently I was wondering about this. Why community struggle with GW produced rules of quite a fluctuating quality for so, so long? Why not finally stop buying battletomes, say "no, this service is bad, we'll do it ourselfs" and produce a set or sets of partially or competely remade home rules for all factions and subfactions over time and then play by them at most tournaments? Honestly, coming from TW:W competitive scene, where all tournaments are played by their own rules and army caps (mostly by Shetland then Turin approved ruleset), this strikes me as extremely weird. Sure, it would be rough at first, you'll need a year or even two to rewrite and balance everything properly, but it would open doors wide for community feedback and creativity! Both 40k and AoS communities would be free from current sets of problems (most of imbalance, FAQ wait time, steep power creep, etc), rules would be widely available for everyone... And the best part, if this would eventually become mainstream enough, it would force GW as a corporation to invest in much better rules quality in the future. In other words, win-win.

The most obvious question though would be "and how would we organise such rule creation process?" The answer is quite simple - however you'd like! As long as there are a few sets of home rules in circulation, natural selection will choose the best one and the most popular for most tournaments, while still providing alternatives for some. The most logical way though is to get together a small group or interconnected groups of most experienced and well respected players and start from there, probably beggining from the core rules, trying to keep everything as laconically as possible.

 

I also do not believe that GW would try to legally stop such a thing (unless they want to make a really, REALLY bad and probably quite illegal PR move). It would not be a free distribution of their battletomes rules (and they are already in a free access on youtube and some other places anyway), but it would be just a free distribution of free home rules, may be somewhat remade from battletome basis, but remade nonetheless. As long as you'd play it with official models, you should be fine.

 

So, why not?

Pretty simple really, Warhammer is more then just playing a game, the wargaming aspect is often time the minor small part of the hobby to most people and not everyone buy battletome just for the rules but often time for the collectability and hobby lore aspect. The community is not always thinking about competitive play but painting and having fun and socializing

TW Warhammer is basically a game you play and there not much other then it just being a PC game

i remember Warhammer weekly made a good point of why He oppose Comp because it would do the opposite and GW would not feel the need to improve or be responsible for their rule writing if the Community all of a sudden started their own.
 

At the end of the day GW is a model company and even though they sometimes look like they care about competitive play their rules are secondary to them. It like how CA focus on single player over multiplayer aspect of TW:W

[Landohammer]

4 hours ago, Zeblasky said:

My guess that such things would still happen in the future, but pretty rarely.

But honestly, just recently I was wondering about this. Why community struggle with GW produced rules of quite a fluctuating quality for so, so long? Why not finally stop buying battletomes, say "no, this service is bad, we'll do it ourselfs" and produce a set or sets of partially or competely remade home rules for all factions and subfactions over time and then play by them at most tournaments? Honestly, coming from TW:W competitive scene, where all tournaments are played by their own rules and army caps (mostly by Shetland then Turin approved ruleset), this strikes me as extremely weird. Sure, it would be rough at first, you'll need a year or even two to rewrite and balance everything properly, but it would open doors wide for community feedback and creativity! Both 40k and AoS communities would be free from current sets of problems (most of imbalance, FAQ wait time, steep power creep, etc), rules would be widely available for everyone... And the best part, if this would eventually become mainstream enough, it would force GW as a corporation to invest in much better rules quality in the future. In other words, win-win.

The most obvious question though would be "and how would we organise such rule creation process?" The answer is quite simple - however you'd like! As long as there are a few sets of home rules in circulation, natural selection will choose the best one and the most popular for most tournaments, while still providing alternatives for some. The most logical way though is to get together a small group or interconnected groups of most experienced and well respected players and start from there, probably beggining from the core rules, trying to keep everything as laconically as possible.

 

I also do not believe that GW would try to legally stop such a thing (unless they want to make a really, REALLY bad and probably quite illegal PR move). It would not be a free distribution of their battletomes rules (and they are already in a free access on youtube and some other places anyway), but it would be just a free distribution of free home rules, may be somewhat remade from battletome basis, but remade nonetheless. As long as you'd play it with official models, you should be fine.

 

So, why not?

You just perfectly described The Ninth Age lol.

We learned a lot from the Ninth Age experiment, and I personally enjoyed playing it as a means to bridge the gap between the End Times and AOS 2.0. It definitely served a purpose. But it was a MASSIVE amount of work by a lot of talented/dedicated people that ultimately went nowhere. 

People will always prefer officially supported games, even if the product is inferior. 

[NinthMusketeer]

Let's not miss the forest for the trees here; people are willing to put up with Warhammer rules quality for a number of reasons and the quality itself is one of them. GW writes a lot of bad rules and really pushes the boundary for how mind-blastingly inane something can be, but they also write a lot of good rules and often push the bar on stuff that may not be the most balanced but is simply FUN. GW understands that competitive play is very visible but also a very small fraction of the game. A wargame can't run on competitive players alone; it lives and dies by its casual community.

Take the AoS hero & monster actions. While they can and are exploited to cause issues it is hard to deny that outside of those minorities (and even within them to some extent) they are a heck of a lot of fun to play with. More sane rules writers may never have produced such a crazy concept. Warhammer has always thrived on a certain level of madness.

And I feel the above leads into why a lot of fan comps fail; they are so focused on what Warhammer does poorly that they forget the point is to better highlight what Warhammer does well.

[Zeblasky]

2 hours ago, Sleboda said:

What happens when a player (who spent their cash of the official rules just like everyone else) decides he doesn't like the ruling of some Council of Basement Dudes and, rightly, expects the game to be played by, oh, the actual rules?

The same thing that happens when a player does not want to play by a ruiling of some Council of Games Workshop : P People like having freedom of choice. And when they spend cash for a FAQ for FAQ for FAQ... yea, that's not great. So having an option to play in a tournament run under one or the other rulesets would be pretty great.
 

2 hours ago, Sleboda said:

Acting like "the community" is ever going to act like a cohesive, agreeable, insightful, intelligent whole? Never gonna happen.

Of course not. But community can create a few centres of gravity in terms of rules, and one of those could eventually become large enough to eclipse official rules. It would not be perfect, it would not make all of us rejoice in unison, it would still produce a lot of screaming and toxicity... yet it could still become better then what we have.

 

1 hour ago, Nizrah said:

Because it not that easy? Look at the 9th age. Game made completly by "fans". Its totally unbalanced just like GW games. Also there is lack of major authority for Age of Sigmar communities. There was such thing for wfb, it was called "euro" rulespack and it was total cancer. 

Of course it's not easy. Sure it does not always goes as planned. Yes, it needs time and dedication. But should that stop a community forever from trying it anyway? If it goes well, great, and if it fails, some good ideas will come from it anyway. The main thing here is NOT to have a single big rules project, but at least 3 smaller ones, which would both compete and learn/borrow ideas from each other. That's the best way in my opinion, as this allows for more creative thinking and better natural selection.

 

52 minutes ago, novakai said:

i remember Warhammer weekly made a good point of why He oppose Comp because it would do the opposite and GW would not feel the need to improve or be responsible for their rule writing if the Community all of a sudden started their own.

 

At the end of the day GW is a model company and even though they sometimes look like they care about competitive play their rules are secondary to them. It like how CA focus on single player over multiplayer aspect of TW:W

I'm thinking that quite an opposite thing would happen - if home rulesets woud become dominant, that would lead to a noticeably less battletomes sales, and that leads to GW trying to fix it. If there is one language this company understands, it's money, and you've seen how hard they push for physical book sales in 40k, they need it.

And true, CA did focus on a SP over MP most of the time. But, thanks to the MP community, our tournaments, rulesets, feedback and even some mods, over the course of WH2, CA quickly realised how great a value can MP generate. So they started investing in it much heavily than in WH1: gradually created mostly great balance (if complared to WH1 it was night and day, first game was extremely unbalanced), started sponsoring grand promotional tournaments and implemented quite a few things from us into the core MP. It is however also true that CA generally listens to feedback much closer than GW, as (for one example) lead balance developer (great guy btw, we love him) was in our then small tournament discord from around 2017, then joined a much bigger Turin Discord, played very well in one tournament and from time to time he still freely talks to us about bugs and balance, including to yours truly. Yea, it was that good. Now just imagine talking to GW lead balance designer on a open Discord server about new battletome instead and you start to see, that GW needs to change some things around.

 

13 minutes ago, Landohammer said:

You just perfectly described The Ninth Age lol.

We learned a lot from the Ninth Age experiment, and I personally enjoyed playing it as a means to bridge the gap between the End Times and AOS 2.0. It definitely served a purpose. But it was a MASSIVE amount of work by a lot of talented/dedicated people that ultimately went nowhere. 

People will always prefer officially supported games, even if the product is inferior. 

Well, I know almost nothing about Ninth Age, so I cannot say anything about that. Still though, if a single project, based on an initially very ploblematic ruleset of WHFB, failed to produced something more balanced and good, does this mean WH community should never attempt this again? I still believe that if we would have not one, but a few rule projects working in parallel, it could eventually lead to a more stable and balanced ruleset, as competition in this field produces much better results. Or at least GW noticing this enough to invest more into quality control would be a satisfactory result.

[Zeblasky]

25 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

Let's not miss the forest for the trees here; people are willing to put up with Warhammer rules quality for a number of reasons and the quality itself is one of them. GW writes a lot of bad rules and really pushes the boundary for how mind-blastingly inane something can be, but they also write a lot of good rules and often push the bar on stuff that may not be the most balanced but is simply FUN. GW understands that competitive play is very visible but also a very small fraction of the game. A wargame can't run on competitive players alone; it lives and dies by its casual community.

Take the AoS hero & monster actions. While they can and are exploited to cause issues it is hard to deny that outside of those minorities (and even within them to some extent) they are a heck of a lot of fun to play with. More sane rules writers may never have produced such a crazy concept. Warhammer has always thrived on a certain level of madness.

And I feel the above leads into why a lot of fan comps fail; they are so focused on what Warhammer does poorly that they forget the point is to better highlight what Warhammer does well.

Oh, I absolutely agree here. GW can do both crazy good and crazy bad things in term of rules. And fun is one of the things you should never forget, even in a competitive environment. It's just people that are too focused on a heavily competitive things tend to dismiss fun things as they are usually hard to balance x) And, well, one men fun may be another men pain, but that's another story.

Edited September 2, 2021 by Zeblasky

[Landohammer]

10 minutes ago, Zeblasky said:

 

 

Well, I know almost nothing about Ninth Age, so I cannot say anything about that. Still though, if a single project, based on an initially very ploblematic ruleset of WHFB, failed to produced something more balanced and good, does this mean WH community should never attempt this again? I still believe that if we would have not one, but a few rule projects working in parallel, it could eventually lead to a more stable and balanced ruleset, as competition in this field produces much better results. Or at least GW noticing this enough to invest more into quality control would be a satisfactory result.

Thats just it, it DID produce a balanced ruleset that was great. It was constantly monitored and adjusted by data analysts based on constantly evolving meta data. 

The problem is that nobody really played it outside of a few niche circles.  Creating the comp is just a small part of the problem. The real challenge is getting players and events to adopt the comp.

Its a matter of authority. If GW nerfs your big bad unit, then most people will begrudgingly accept it. But if some rando on the internet tries to nerf it, human nature kicks and and players of that faction tend to revolt. 

Consider that T9A had a huge advantage here, because at the time a lot of events were already using the "Swedish Comp" system for tournaments. And so when that team got behind T9A, it really gave the project a sense of authority. You would need a major event coordinator or someone like Goonhammer/AOS Coach to back a comp project for it to have any chance nowadays.

[novakai]

53 minutes ago, Zeblasky said:

The same thing that happens when a player does not want to play by a ruiling of some Council of Games Workshop : P People like having freedom of choice. And when they spend cash for a FAQ for FAQ for FAQ... yea, that's not great. So having an option to play in a tournament run under one or the other rulesets would be pretty great.
 

Of course not. But community can create a few centres of gravity in terms of rules, and one of those could eventually become large enough to eclipse official rules. It would not be perfect, it would not make all of us rejoice in unison, it would still produce a lot of screaming and toxicity... yet it could still become better then what we have.

 

Of course it's not easy. Sure it does not always goes as planned. Yes, it needs time and dedication. But should that stop a community forever from trying it anyway? If it goes well, great, and if it fails, some good ideas will come from it anyway. The main thing here is NOT to have a single big rules project, but at least 3 smaller ones, which would both compete and learn/borrow ideas from each other. That's the best way in my opinion, as this allows for more creative thinking and better natural selection.

 

I'm thinking that quite an opposite thing would happen - if home rulesets woud become dominant, that would lead to a noticeably less battletomes sales, and that leads to GW trying to fix it. If there is one language this company understands, it's money, and you've seen how hard they push for physical book sales in 40k, they need it.

And true, CA did focus on a SP over MP most of the time. But, thanks to the MP community, our tournaments, rulesets, feedback and even some mods, over the course of WH2, CA quickly realised how great a value can MP generate. So they started investing in it much heavily than in WH1: gradually created mostly great balance (if complared to WH1 it was night and day, first game was extremely unbalanced), started sponsoring grand promotional tournaments and implemented quite a few things from us into the core MP. It is however also true that CA generally listens to feedback much closer than GW, as (for one example) lead balance developer (great guy btw, we love him) was in our then small tournament discord from around 2017, then joined a much bigger Turin Discord, played very well in one tournament and from time to time he still freely talks to us about bugs and balance, including to yours truly. Yea, it was that good. Now just imagine talking to GW lead balance designer on a open Discord server about new battletome instead and you start to see, that GW needs to change some things around.

 

Well, I know almost nothing about Ninth Age, so I cannot say anything about that. Still though, if a single project, based on an initially very ploblematic ruleset of WHFB, failed to produced something more balanced and good, does this mean WH community should never attempt this again? I still believe that if we would have not one, but a few rule projects working in parallel, it could eventually lead to a more stable and balanced ruleset, as competition in this field produces much better results. Or at least GW noticing this enough to invest more into quality control would be a satisfactory result.

Yeah but I then it just goes the way that GW has a level of authority that people listen too and the issues of the TT war gaming community is build different then esport gamers. 

I also suspect GW are just not concern about balance and comp being dominant, because they design the framework of the game  and army rules and people already casually comp it when playing the games, yet people still buy their books because the values in them is not just the rules
 

TW is a videogame and just playing each other competitive is really the only ways while Warhammer has more social artistic and creative aspect then just a TT game. it just a different community overall too and I don’t think comparison are fair between digital media and physical hobbies.

Edited September 2, 2021 by novakai

[Reinholt]

Having worked in another field, the thing that slays me about this is that there is a solution to crowdsourcing comp: it's called a market.

A very simple proposal, given we have Honest Wargamer and equivalent places keeping score of event results:

1. If a faction has < 45% win rate, add 5% of points they can bring each subsequent month until they get into the 45-55% range.
2. If a faction has > 55% win rate, remove 5% of points they can bring each subsequent month until they get into the 45-55% range.

To that end, you just slowly bulk up the weak and pare back the strong until you get to balance. Maybe 1900 of Idoneth vs. 2200 of Sylvaneth turns out to be balanced.

What this wouldn't fix is critical failures like either ward stacking or if GW does something pants on head dumb like make a unit accidentally invulnerable or something, but some sort of gentle community mechanism that doesn't rely on specific changes to rules (barring true catastrophic situations) is the kind of method that could get general adoption if done based on aggregate results.

[Zeblasky]

17 minutes ago, Landohammer said:

The real challenge is getting players and events to adopt the comp.

Its a matter of authority. If GW nerfs your big bad unit, then most people will begrudgingly accept it. But if some rando on the internet tries to nerf it, human nature kicks and and players of that faction tend to revolt. 

Consider that T9A had a huge advantage here, because at the time a lot of events were already using the "Swedish Comp" system for tournaments. And so when that team got behind T9A, it really gave the project a sense of authority. You would need a major event coordinator or someone like Goonhammer/AOS Coach to back a comp project for it to have any chance nowadays.

Of course. I do believe though that getting the backing of certain big figures/tournament organizers probably should not be too hard, provided you would have at least a decent ruleset for them - people generally like to promote some variety, and even if your ruleset won't become a new constant, it could still be viewed as playing the base game with a remaster mod for a slightly different kind of fun.

Getting most of the community to be on board with rebalance though would be... tough. It's not just nerfs and buffs that create problems. When you change the rules for a unit or a faction, and make them behave differently, you could alienate some people even when that unit becomes stronger than it was. But as I've said, I understand that this is not easy.

 

1 hour ago, Reinholt said:

Having worked in another field, the thing that slays me about this is that there is a solution to crowdsourcing comp: it's called a market.

A very simple proposal, given we have Honest Wargamer and equivalent places keeping score of event results:

1. If a faction has < 45% win rate, add 5% of points they can bring each subsequent month until they get into the 45-55% range.
2. If a faction has > 55% win rate, remove 5% of points they can bring each subsequent month until they get into the 45-55% range.

To that end, you just slowly bulk up the weak and pare back the strong until you get to balance. Maybe 1900 of Idoneth vs. 2200 of Sylvaneth turns out to be balanced.

What this wouldn't fix is critical failures like either ward stacking or if GW does something pants on head dumb like make a unit accidentally invulnerable or something, but some sort of gentle community mechanism that doesn't rely on specific changes to rules (barring true catastrophic situations) is the kind of method that could get general adoption if done based on aggregate results.

Interesting idea, but getting stable and deep statistics for such undertaking would be somewhat challenging.
 

[Zeblasky]

1 hour ago, novakai said:

TW is a videogame and just playing each other competitive is really the only ways while Warhammer has more social artistic and creative aspect then just a TT game. it just a different community overall too and I don’t think comparison are fair between digital media and physical hobbies.

Here's the funny thing. When in TW:W 1 and 2 Singleplayer people were occasionally attaking Multiplayer crowd for "ruining SP fun with their pointless balance changes and diverting resources from a main game mode for a pointless MP almost no one plays", MP crowd, besides other reasons, defended themself by an argument that WHFB was primarily a tabletop multiplayer game, and as such, TW:W should be focused on good multiplayer balance and support as well.

So yea, there are actually a lot of parallels here x)

Edited September 2, 2021 by Zeblasky