Unpopular opinion thread

[BrocknerTheBear]

@Skreech Verminking "The abity to fire three rounds a minute in any weather"

[Noserenda]

My current unpopular opinion, maybe the double turn row could have its own thread rather than periodically making this one unbearably tedious?

[Aeryenn]

11 hours ago, Kasper said:

If the "double turn" was as black and white as you make it out to be, explain how its always the same good players winning tournaments over and over? Are they just.. More lucky?

It's not the skill that wins tournaments. It's a list of miniatures that currently is the best possible combination under present set of rules. You asked the wrong question. It's not why "the same good players" win tournaments. It's why always the same good armies win tournaments. If it was about skill then we would see the whole spectrum of armies winning games. Why aren't Beasts of Chaos, Gloomspite Gitz or Nighthaunt winning tournaments? Is it just a coincidence that good players keep away from them? Unfortunately not. I'd say 50% of your chances to win is the army you play. 25% is if you take advantage of current rules and how many imbalanced units you put on the list. Another 25% is skill.

Look how many "good players" switch from army to army just when the edition/battletome change. There were several armies that had sine wave interest of players just as their rules changed. Kharadron Overlords, Hedonites of Slaanesh, Tzeentch...

That's what wins games.

Edited November 26, 2021 by Aeryenn

[Skreech Verminking]

9 hours ago, BrocknerTheBear said:

@Skreech Verminking "The abity to fire three rounds a minute in any weather"

Interesting opinion.

I personally believe that a good player winning a game would need to get a good win streak with the currently badly performing army known as the skaven.

If a player isn’t able to do so, he isn’t a good player in my eyes.

and since currently nobody was able to do so

good players currently don’t exist (except those few guys who have gotten a 4-1 win with gloomspite and beasts of chaos)

 

56 minutes ago, Aeryenn said:

It's not the skill that wins tournaments. It's a list of miniatures that currently is the best possible combination under present set of rules. You asked the wrong question. It's not why "the same good players" win tournaments. It's why always the same good armies win tournaments. If it was about skill then we would see the whole spectrum of armies winning games. Why aren't Beasts of Chaos, Gloomspite Gitz or Nighthaunt winning tournaments? Is it just a coincidence that good players keep away from them? Unfortunately not. I'd say 50% of your chances to win is the army you play. 25% is if you take advantage of current rules and how many imbalanced units you put on the list. Another 25% is skill.

Look how many "good players" switch from army to army just when the edition/battletome change. There were several armies that had sine wave interest of players just as their rules changed. Kharadron Overlords, Hedonites of Slaanesh, Tzeentch...

That's what wins games.

You hit the nail in the box.

Yet wouldn’t the few players who are actually capable of taking wins with their current underperforming armies as gitz, beasts and skaven, be the currently true and only good players?

I’m not certain if a person playing one of the top armies and has copied his list from some other guy, could be considered a good player.

 

Edited November 26, 2021 by Skreech Verminking

[EccentricCircle]

Speaking as quite a bad player, I would say that a good player is one who has a solid ability to think both tactically, and strategically. They are good because they use all of their resources to the fullest.

Some if this comes in optimising a good list as part of the metagame for sure. However the best list in the world won't save you if you don't understand why ut is good, and can't use it effectively in game. You need to know what all the synergies are and how and when to best employ them. Then by planning ahead, strategically, in how you place and utilitise those units to maximise your gain.

But the killer, which I've never been able to do really, is to know how to do that for your opponents army too, so that you can figure out their strategy, and why they are putting things where they are. Then you can most effectively counter their plays.

Intellectually I know how to do all this, but I can't hold that many rules in my head, so always end playing quite reactively. I suspect this is obvious to a skilled opponent who sees I don't have a plan beyond this turn and presses the advantage. 

Thus I'm very much on the side of thinking that variations un ability is more important than balance if units and armies, and that learning to play better is more useful than chasing the meta. The new army may be the best, but you still need to do the work to use it well.

 

Edited November 26, 2021 by EccentricCircle

[Kasper]

1 hour ago, Aeryenn said:

It's not the skill that wins tournaments. It's a list of miniatures that currently is the best possible combination under present set of rules. You asked the wrong question. It's not why "the same good players" win tournaments. It's why always the same good armies win tournaments. If it was about skill then we would see the whole spectrum of armies winning games. Why aren't Beasts of Chaos, Gloomspite Gitz or Nighthaunt winning tournaments? Is it just a coincidence that good players keep away from them? Unfortunately not. I'd say 50% of your chances to win is the army you play. 25% is if you take advantage of current rules and how many imbalanced units you put on the list. Another 25% is skill.

Look how many "good players" switch from army to army just when the edition/battletome change. There were several armies that had sine wave interest of players just as their rules changed. Kharadron Overlords, Hedonites of Slaanesh, Tzeentch...

That's what wins games.

This is completely different. You are talking about why every army isnt equal where as we were talking about the priority mechanic. In fact you could argue that every army should indeed be getting podiums since the dreaded double turn is oh so game deciding, surely there are Beast of Chaos players out there who are lucky and get a couple of double turns during their tournament session, so they should be winning right?

The same good players are winning tournaments/getting great podium results with various armies, not just because they bring the most broken stuff. It goes without saying that at a tournament the majority of players are bringing filth to the party, afterall the main point of a tournament is to compete against each other so people generally take whatever list they consider to have a good shot at winning. People are "netlisting" left and right so even your Average Joe will bring a rather competitive list most of the time.

If there was no skill involved in the priority mechanic and it literally always just came down to a dice roll, then why isnt Average Joe getting podiums despite bringing more or less the exact same list to a tournament as any of the top players that repeatly get great results? 

The answer is obvious, and thats because there is a massive difference and if you think otherwise you are kidding yourself.

[Kasper]

11 hours ago, Battlefury said:

Certainly not false. If people come to the conclusion, that they want something to be different, you can't just dismiss it like that. Their opinion is valid, but maybe it differs from your own experience / expectations.

It is false, it is not a case of having a subjective opinion. Claiming "there's no tactics that the doubleturn introduces" is just not true. It adds a lot to the game.

11 hours ago, JackStreicher said:

Reeding this took me ages since my eyes couldn’t stop rolling. 🙄

It is true though. A lot of people at a low skill just push their stuff forward with little thought of what might be coming the following turn, they lose the roll-off and then go "****** I hate this double turn it just lost me the game". No, you knew it was a possibility and set yourself up to be hit by it.

I know you despise the mechanic, just dont play with it if its that big of a deal. But clamining it ruins AoS is frankly laughable.

[Battlefury]

@KasperApparently, you don't want to understand it.

Certain amries prevent people from doin mistakes due to design = not a lot of skill needed.
Other armies are cursed by design and are NOT in the top played armies, since even "good" players won't use them.

Ergo:

Even a "bad" player has a better chance with a good armie. A "good" player will not have a good chance with a bad army.

If you want to show, that it is different, please show me events, that use the vanilla AoS rules, where BoK, BoC, NH, GsG won. In addition show me the matchups, since certain amthups are just not possible to win.

[Aeryenn]

31 minutes ago, Skreech Verminking said:

Yet wouldn’t the few players who are actually capable of taking wins with their current underperforming armies as gitz, beasts and skaven, be the currently true and only good players?

Exactly.

These are the players who win despite the odds, not thanks to them. Also winning with underperforming armies tastes much, much better than defeating your opponent with eel, sentinel or whatever other spam that is currently taking advantage from rules. The latter is just that - giving yourself an advantage.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

3 minutes ago, Battlefury said:

Even a "bad" player has a better chance with a good armie. A "good" player will not have a good chance with a bad army.

If you want to show, that it is different, please show me events, that use the vanilla AoS rules, where BoK, BoC, NH, GsG won. In addition show me the matchups, since certain amthups are just not possible to win.

Nighthaunt recently went 4-1 at Da Boyz GT and 5-0 at Little Bo Peep GT. I think Beasts of Chaos also recently went 4-1. Not to mention the other recent notable upsets, like Flesh Eater Courts, OBR and Slaanesh:

As far as competitive games go, AoS seems to have a fairly healthy number of tournament viable factions and a combination of skill and luck seems to allow even low tier factions to have a shot at winning a tournament.

[Sagittarii Orientalis]

19 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

Nighthaunt recently went 4-1 at Da Boyz GT and 5-0 at Little Bo Peep GT. I think Beasts of Chaos also recently went 4-1. Not to mention the other recent notable upsets, like Flesh Eater Courts, OBR and Slaanesh:

As far as competitive games go, AoS seems to have a fairly healthy number of tournament viable factions and a combination of skill and luck seems to allow even low tier factions to have a shot at winning a tournament.

I must first confess that I am no expert on interpreting statistics.

But isn't it "disingenuous" to conclude that the above table shows "fairly healthy number of tournament viable factions", when top factions are sporting 20 or even more(in case of SoB, more than 50) 4-1 Wins while Nighthaunt and BoC have ...... 2 or 5 4-1 Wins? And I am not counting 5-0 Wins, of which there are none for two factions(nighthaunt, BoC) you have specifically cited.

Unless you are assuming the faction is competitively "viable" as long as there is even a single case of 4-1 Wins for any faction, regardless of how great the gap between top performing factions and underperforming factions is.

Edited November 26, 2021 by Sagittarii Orientalis

[Aeryenn]

@Neil Arthur Hotep

There will always be some exceptions. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. 😉

But during a given period of time we see the same armies on top most of the time. It might be the same players all the time, as they often switch to what is currently "meta" to give themselves advantage and have higher chances of winning. When I was following some of local tournaments results I saw it all the time. One player was playing DoK when they were best, then switched to eel spam and then again to Lumineth. Always chasing the "meta", always giving himself an advantage over others.

[Marcvs]

16 minutes ago, Aeryenn said:

But during a given period of time we see the same armies on top most of the time. It might be the same players all the time, as they often switch to what is currently "meta" to give themselves advantage and have higher chances of winning. When I was following some of local tournaments results I saw it all the time. One player was playing DoK when they were best, then switched to eel spam and then again to Lumineth. Always chasing the "meta", always giving himself an advantage over others.

I don't think I have ever seen a game which involves deck/army/team building where this is not the case though.

(of course, we might discuss whether this has a larger impact in AoS due to less frequent balancing patches / insufficient playtesting / time to get an army painted and ready)

[pnkdth]

12 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

Nighthaunt recently went 4-1 at Da Boyz GT and 5-0 at Little Bo Peep GT. I think Beasts of Chaos also recently went 4-1. Not to mention the other recent notable upsets, like Flesh Eater Courts, OBR and Slaanesh:

Fringe cases do occur due to a string of perfect match-ups or maybe someone has create an unexpected anti-meta list which catches people off-guard.

Top 6 factions have 236 of 430 4+, 19 of 79 5wins.

Bottom 6 factions have 44 of 430 4+, 2 of 79 5wins.

Notably SBGL, SoB, Seraphon, DoT with 8-10 5wins has twice as many as the tier below them with 4-6 5wins (LRL of 6s). So in regards to 2.0 the meta is healthier since the upper half is more spread out. However, if you also look at data presented by THW you can still identify the top dogs and trends.

TL;DR: The meta is much healthier than in 2.0 and the main focus should be to bring up the bottom of the pile while nipping off some of the buds in the top tier. Let's hope the winter changes reflect what we've learned so far from the data.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

27 minutes ago, Sagittarii Orientalis said:

I must first confess that I am no expert on interpreting statistics.

But isn't it "disingenuous" to conclude that the above table shows "fairly healthy number of tournament viable factions", when top factions are sporting 20 or even more(in case of SoB, more than 50) 4-1 Wins while Nighthaunt and BoC have ...... 2 or 5 4-1 Wins? And I am not counting 5-0 Wins, of which there are none for two factions(nighthaunt, BoC) you have specifically cited.

Unless you are assuming the faction is competitively "viable" as long as there is even a single case of 4-1 Wins for any faction, regardless of how great the gap between top performing factions and underperforming factions is.

I don't think it's disingenuous. But it does depend on your perspective of what it means for a faction to be viable. I'm not denying that there are a few obvious top tiers right now. But what I am denying is that no other armies have a chance to compete. Everything above Sylvaneth in on the Metawatch list seems to have a fair chance to win a tournament. Everything above Fyreslayers is at least a dark horse competitor. And we occasionally see even the bottom tier do well.

My perspective on this data is by comparison to other competitive games. There are no games I can think of without top and bottom tiers, but in many games the gap between those tier is a lot larger than in AoS. Frequently, even mid tiers don't really have a chance at winning a tournament at all. That makes me say that there are many tournament viable factions in AoS: If a faction has won a tournament, that proves that it can win tournaments. And about half of the factions in the game even seem to have a pretty good chance at doing so. Those are good numbers from a competitive point of view.

11 minutes ago, pnkdth said:

Fringe cases do occur due to a string of perfect match-ups or maybe someone has create an unexpected anti-meta list which catches people off-guard.

That's right, of course. I'm not claiming that Nighthaunt are on the level of Sons of Behemat or anything like that. The post I was responding to specifically claimed that low tiers can't win tournaments, though, which is what I was trying to refute.

[Enoby]

13 minutes ago, Marcvs said:

I don't think I have ever seen a game which involves deck/army/team building where this is not the case though.

(of course, we might discuss whether this has a larger impact in AoS due to less frequent balancing patches / insufficient playtesting / time to get an army painted and ready)

Quite unrelated, but I think Malifaux does a good job of this - because you see what is effectively the "battleplan" and choice of "battle tactics" (strategies and schemes) before you make your crew, most crews have strengths and weaknesses so you'll only see them when the game would facilitate it. 

E.g. you have some crews that are good at scheming and some that are good at killing, and some games require more or less killing or scheming.

In terms of AoS, while you do get different battleplans, the inability to change your army midway through a tournament means that armies have to be designed with the ability to do everything in mind (or have a way to make up for what they can't do), and armies that are too specific or have bad match ups struggle to see high level play as they have a much higher chance of being walled compared to a generalist faction.   

That's not to say they should make AoS more like Malifaux, or than Malifaux doesn't have its issues, but I do think the flexibility of list building and every game being randomised (e.g. random strategy, random scheme, random deployment) really helps keep a fresh meta. 

[Aeryenn]

51 minutes ago, Marcvs said:

I don't think I have ever seen a game which involves deck/army/team building where this is not the case though.

Yeah of course but some people just play AoS for fun and/or painting minis, not to win all the time. Regarding the table I have THREE out of SIX worst factions (Gloomspite, Nighthaunt and BoK... nice score, right?) and still have a lot of fun from AoS. My best army is place 13th - Sylvaneth, which still is bad. 😄 I'm in the middle of painting Tzeentch but it's Mortal focused so it doesn't count. 😉

Edited November 26, 2021 by Aeryenn

[RuneBrush]

Just thought of a new unpopular opinion - I really don't like meta lists like the one from WarCom because it doesn't show the sub-factional varieties.  Ogor as an example can be Gutbuster or Beastclaw 😉  That said, I do think they quite accurately highlight the half a dozen battletomes that are really struggling (yeah, two of mine)

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

1 minute ago, RuneBrush said:

Just thought of a new unpopular opinion - I really don't like meta lists like the one from WarCom because it doesn't show the sub-factional varieties.  Ogor as an example can be Gutbuster or Beastclaw 😉  That said, I do think they quite accurately highlight the half a dozen battletomes that are really struggling (yeah, two of mine)

Yeah, it would always be nice to have better stats. And those meta breakdowns also don't tell you too much about the casual experience. I would wager that the old Beastclaw three Start Collecting box list actually does a lot better in most casual games than the Warcom break down would imply.

[Beliman]

1 hour ago, RuneBrush said:

Just thought of a new unpopular opinion - I really don't like meta lists like the one from WarCom because it doesn't show the sub-factional varieties.  Ogor as an example can be Gutbuster or Beastclaw 😉  That said, I do think they quite accurately highlight the half a dozen battletomes that are really struggling (yeah, two of mine)

I think exactly the same.

Kharadrons were OP in 2 edition, until you played Barak-Zon without WLV and an Ironclad full of pew-pew-dudes. Yeah, same army, but far away from being "OP".

Note: Same for all other factions*

 

 

*Gargants not included

[pnkdth]

14 minutes ago, RuneBrush said:

Just thought of a new unpopular opinion - I really don't like meta lists like the one from WarCom because it doesn't show the sub-factional varieties.  Ogor as an example can be Gutbuster or Beastclaw 😉  That said, I do think they quite accurately highlight the half a dozen battletomes that are really struggling (yeah, two of mine)

THW does faction break downs which includes internal data on sub-factions and also battalions used (just jump ahead to the relevant faction with the time stamps). So in this regard the quality of data available is increasing.

For easy reference and for anyone who missed it/was unaware:

 

[Skreech Verminking]

26 minutes ago, pnkdth said:

just jump ahead to the relevant faction

So skaven?

[Dogmantra]

Re: what makes a good player... winning the game.

It's a competitive game. The point is to find a winner. If you consistently take actions that enable you to win the game, you are by definition a good player.

The fact is that army choice and list composition are a decision point that does contribute to your chances of winning. The unfortunate reality is that this is constrained by the substantial amount of money and time that it takes to create a new army, and I think most people agree (myself included) that having the time and money to switch armies to what's strong is not a desirable skill to test. Even if you are skilled in list-building and recognise that some model or combination will be particularly good, you then have the barrier of actually getting it and painting it. The reaction to this from a lot of people is I feel to focus on individual strong performers (morathi, sentinels, etc), and request they are nerfed. This is not to say that these models aren't too strong, but it's a sisyphean task, as soon as the top performer has been brought down, there will be another. In a game where creating an army is such a big investment, people who care about winning will often stick to what they know works. This creates a sort of feedback loop where the egregious outperformers that everyone knows about start to get way overrepresented. You clearly can win without using the hanful of top performing armies; as mentioned above, Nighthaunt have had some strong results recently despite being considered a weaker army. The other side effect I have noticed from the investment in an army is a sort of tribalism where the goal of balance passes is not necessarily to improve the game state for everyone but to put your army on top for a change, which is again, not a competitively healthy approach to game balance.

So what can we do to fix this?

We could continue to demand that Games Workshop continually balance tweaks models to attain a perfect (or good enough) state of balance. This would be nice, but it takes a lot of work to balance such a large game. Additionally, changing the rules too often doesn't allow time for the metagame to settle down. It can be surprising how with time and experimentation, options go in and out of favour without any mechanical changes. I was once part of a competitive community for a game called Puzzle Strike. The common wisdom was that there was a "big three" of characters who were generally considered the top tier. Over a period of a few months, a few of the top players spent time experimenting, and I witnessed in real time the general acceptance within the community of a fourth character who had previously been considered maybe mid-tier to join the big three. The game had received no balance changes at all, just further experimentation and understanding that changed the meta. The point of the story is that sometimes you have to give a game time without changes in order for players to find solutions to things, or ideas that will change how it's played. I'm not saying that this is specifically the case with current community bugbears in AoS, they could well be too strong. But if we constantly nerf them we'll never know if actually there was counterplay there, but no one had figured it out yet.

We could also house rule our tournaments. Take matters into our own hands and change the rules to give weaker factions or models a leg up, and take the stronger ones down a peg. This is a somewhat popular approach in the AoS community, often known as "comping". Personally I strongly dislike it. I think it has the same issues as constant balance patches: by frequently changing the rules of the game, you make it difficult for the metagame to mature, but it also has its own issue which is that the game then becomes inconsistent. It becomes very difficult to be a "good player" when at the extreme end, each tournament may have its own set of house rules that tweak how things work, and you may have zero experience of playing in this environment because your local group may have their own house rules which differ. I also think that it can be easy to bring one's own preconceptions into the game when creating house rules, whereas having a single disinterested third party create the rules gives them a consistency in purpose.

My actual solution to make Age of Sigmar a more competitive game where being a good player feels like it's about being a good player is pretty straightforward. We need to create a culture where proxying, unpainted models, cardboard standees, and sharing minis and books is 100% accepted within tournament play. Pooling resources is the most appealing way this could work, because I cannot deny that playing a game with fully painted models is more satisfying, so building "model libraries" that are available for players to freely borrow from during competitive events would be incredible. Unfortunately that's not feasible for your average tournament organiser, perhaps on a local community level it's something to try to develop. But the other options, blanket allowing proxies/standees/unpainted models, these also work to remove the barriers in army switching/selection and make that part of the game solely about the player's decision making, rather than a combination of their decision making, whether they have a well-paying job, and their ability to paint 30 of the same model in a weekend. This change in the culture would not 100% make all the balance issues better, not by a long shot. But it would open up the scope for players to experiment more, to change armies more freely if they feel that their current army is just too weak to compete, to experiment with composition within armies, and generally increase the freedom of players to try new things and see how they work. In addition, less adventurous competitive minded players can still compete by following trends at the top more easily (I don't think this is actually that much of an issue in terms of stagnation -- looking at other games, particularly esports, with a lot more data than AoS, you find that the top players are innovating quite frequently).

It's fine to not like that suggestion. I expect a lot of people don't. I don't wholly like it myself either, I would much rather play games with fully painted beautiful miniatures. Sometimes there are compromises you make, and it's up to you to decide if you would rather have a game with a more mature metagame with fewer barriers to competition, or a game that looks and feels great on the table. That's not meant to be a pithy statement by the way, I'm not intending to make people who disagree with me sound superficial or shallow. I also think that people should run more games days as events, as opposed to tournaments. I think a lot of people would have a lot more fun if events were more clearly demarcated as for competitive play or not. These games days could be run almost exactly like tournaments, just without caring or maybe even keeping track of who wins at the end of the day*. Here you can reintroduce your painting requirements, your house rules, whatever you want, because the framing is no longer "this is a competitive setting where the aim is to win the tournament", it's "we're going to play some games, we're going to try to win but we also want to see lovely painting, or a variety of models, or try to make people play in unusual ways". I genuinely think a lot of people would be a lot happier if they went to events not as tournaments, but as games days. And maybe I'll be outvoted. Maybe no one will come to my utopian proxy-filled tournaments, and that would be a shame, but at the same time it'd be a case of the community making an informed decision on what it wants out of Age of Sigmar events, and voting that no, sometimes compromises against competitiveness are okay.

 

*as an aside, writing this bit, I was reminded of my Malifaux and Guild Ball days. The local standard for Malifaux tournaments was that last place got a free ticket to the next event which I thought was a good way of encouraging weaker players to come back and have another go, and the standard for Guild Ball tournaments (at least those that I attended) was a raffle for the prize pack. Podium gets some sort of trophy or token to say "yeah you won", but the prizes like models, accessories, etc were always raffled off. It really helped to foster a nice atmosphere that catered for everyone without any real feelings of bitterness, everyone has a chance to play some games, have some fun, and win a prize. Decoupling the monetary value from the winners really avoided a feels bad situation where players who went more to play some games than to really compete at the top level felt like they were subsidising the top players' hobbies. I'm a firm believer that performance based prizes should be token only because of this.

[Skreech Verminking]

Something I would personally find amusing, would be the inclusion of a price for the person winning the most games with one of the worst armies (from a win percentage) performing currently in the game.

This could encourage people to play Factions that haven’t seen the table for a very long time.

 

[PJetski]

On 11/26/2021 at 4:42 AM, pnkdth said:

Fringe cases do occur due to a string of perfect match-ups or maybe someone has create an unexpected anti-meta list which catches people off-guard.

Top 6 factions have 236 of 430 4+, 19 of 79 5wins.

Bottom 6 factions have 44 of 430 4+, 2 of 79 5wins.

Notably SBGL, SoB, Seraphon, DoT with 8-10 5wins has twice as many as the tier below them with 4-6 5wins (LRL of 6s). So in regards to 2.0 the meta is healthier since the upper half is more spread out. However, if you also look at data presented by THW you can still identify the top dogs and trends.

TL;DR: The meta is much healthier than in 2.0 and the main focus should be to bring up the bottom of the pile while nipping off some of the buds in the top tier. Let's hope the winter changes reflect what we've learned so far from the data.

I agree we must buff stormcast!