New "balance" change gets everything wrong

[Skreech Verminking]

4 hours ago, mojojojo101 said:

Should note both of those seem to be trending downwards both in win rate and meta %. 

Lunineth have a 48% since the Maggotkin release.

 

Makes sense, yet skaven seem to be doing pretty well against the magotkin players, (at least when the player goes all out daemons with glotkin😂)

[Gailon]

I just don't view it as a 'balance' update in the traditional sense. I don't think it is meant to bring bottom factions up, or send top factions down, as much as it is meant to promote some diversity at the table. 

We will see, but I suspect at least some of these will accomplish that goal (although, no sentinels? what?)

the question for me is how this changes the top tables? Sure, SCE with dragons aren't too worried about losing to Gitz, but are they now more likely to lose to Seraphon, or even other mid/top lists? If that's the case then maybe we see fewer dragon spam armies, as people diversify to try to win at the top. 

I strongly suspect we will see fewer salamanders and fewer vanguard raptors for example. I don't know if this will have some huge impact on faction win rates, but it will have an impact on how the tables look and feel. Maybe some SCE go with grandhammers and judicators instead of fulminators and vanguard raptors. This way every game against SCE feels more diverse, and that is a different type of "balance." 

Personally, I think they are trying not to change warscrolls and points all the time, as that arguably messes with more casual players, who really don't care that Seraphon have a 60% win rate, they just want to play with the things they own and painted. 

[Azlak the Damned]

2 hours ago, Gailon said:

I just don't view it as a 'balance' update in the traditional sense. I don't think it is meant to bring bottom factions up, or send top factions down, as much as it is meant to promote some diversity at the table. 

Personally, I think they are trying not to change warscrolls and points all the time, as that arguably messes with more casual players, who really don't care that Seraphon have a 60% win rate, they just want to play with the things they own and painted. 

This! ^^^

I believe the update is to give those people who love to play "underdog" armies a sliver of a chance at pulling out a win where before there would be virtually no chance to win 

[yukishiro1]

5 hours ago, Gailon said:

I just don't view it as a 'balance' update in the traditional sense. I don't think it is meant to bring bottom factions up, or send top factions down, as much as it is meant to promote some diversity at the table. 

I don't see how it really accomplishes that. Either it nerfs the best units hard enough that people take the next-best unit instead, or it doesn't, and they keep taking the best unit. And nobody is going to stop taking something like Morathi because she gives up an extra VP. It just isn't gonna happen. VP are such a non-granular measure that if they somehow managed to get it just right so that (say]) fulminators are now exactly balanced with concussors, that'd just be complete dumb luck that it happens to line up that way. But in 99% of situations the nerf will either go too far or not far enough, and therefore not so much promote build diversity as just shuffle the pack a bit on what the ideal spam build is. 

If they had really cared about list diversity they'd have introduced a progressive points handicap for spam. I outlined one way to do it in another thread, but the basic idea is just that each additional unit beyond the cap costs more. I.e. say the first unit of dragons costs you 340, then the next costs you 360, then 380, etc. This promotes actual unit diversity by making it progressively less attractive to pick the same unit over and over rather than taking something different. 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 22, 2022 by yukishiro1

[Kadeton]

5 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

I don't see how it really accomplishes that. Either it nerfs the best units hard enough that people take the next-best unit instead, or it doesn't, and they keep taking the best unit. And nobody is going to stop taking something like Morathi because she gives up an extra VP. It just isn't gonna happen. VP are such a non-granular measure that if they somehow managed to get it just right so that (say]) fulminators are now exactly balanced with concussors, that'd just be complete dumb luck that it happens to line up that way. But in 99% of situations the nerf will either go too far or not far enough, and therefore not so much promote build diversity as just shuffle the pack a bit on what the ideal spam build is.

It might shake out that way in the end, but I don't think this is as clear-cut a decision as you're making it out to be - mainly because different people seem to be reacting in wildly different ways to this change (everything from "All these units are in the bin now" to "This makes no difference whatsoever"). The community doesn't yet have a good baseline for judging the adjustment to a unit's worth that comes from being a priority target, so its psychological effect on listbuilding varies from person to person.

Compare that to adjusting points or warscrolls, which always has exactly the effect you describe - the unit is either still the best choice, or it's unplayable garbage and immediately replaced by the new best choice to the accompaniment of much complaining. Avoiding such a consistent response is a good thing, IMO.

The majority of balance conversations are dominated by theoretical mathhammer rather than extensive play experience, but the effect of a bonus VP is not mathhammerable in the typical "points per damage/points per wound" way. That's one of its main strengths, along with not invalidating printed material or existing armies.

5 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

If they had really cared about list diversity they'd have introduced a progressive points handicap for spam. I outlined one way to do it in another thread, but the basic idea is just that each additional unit beyond the cap costs more. I.e. say the first unit of dragons costs you 340, then the next costs you 360, then 380, etc. This promotes actual unit diversity by making it progressively less attractive to pick the same unit over and over rather than taking something different.

This would be much more effective at reducing spam, for sure. I hope they arrive at something like this eventually.

[Yondaime]

Did a game vs a stormcast this week, 3 bt and a bloodsecreator got shoot off the board turn 1

And khorne is not even considered in the update

I really hate aos atm 

[Skreech Verminking]

5 hours ago, Yondaime said:

Did a game vs a stormcast this week, 3 bt and a bloodsecreator got shoot off the board turn 1

And khorne is not even considered in the update

I really hate aos atm 

Don’t worry mate, the update wouldn’t have helped your army anyways.

😜

[Yondaime]

15 hours ago, Skreech Verminking said:

Don’t worry mate, the update wouldn’t have helped your army anyways.

😜

probably but it would have benn nice to see something 🙃

[Skreech Verminking]

21 minutes ago, Yondaime said:

probably but it would have benn nice to see something 🙃

I agree with you rhere

[NinthMusketeer]

I think people are seeing this as a replacement for point adjustments or warscroll updates--it isn't. Those are still coming. This is in addition to those; it is a band-aid to tie us over until then without acrewing with any printed material. This isn't an alternative to previous measures, it is an alternative to nothing, which is what we would normally have been getting. 

Again: so long as this doesn't make the game worse, it is an improvement over what we had before. Because it is them being willing to try something new and even if it doesn't help as much as it should they'll learn from it.

Now there is still plenty of room for criticism and I think the OP does have some good points (I wish there was a 'mixed opinion' response option). But faulting this update for not being something it was never intended to be just muddies the water and makes it harder to see what faults lie in the design.

I do agree with the sentiment that labeling underdog armies as 'Prime Hunters' is a bit backhanded. We all know what they are, call them underdogs (or something to that effect) instead of trying to sugar-coat it.

[yukishiro1]

1 hour ago, NinthMusketeer said:

This isn't an alternative to previous measures, it is an alternative to nothing, which is what we would normally have been getting. 

Well...that, or they could have just changed points and redone warscrolls, the way they did last time. Which was underwhelming too, don't get me wrong, because they did a very lazy job with the points changes. But it clearly refutes the idea that their only option was to do something that didn't involve tweaking warscrolls or points, since they did both of those things last edition of the same document. 

 

 

 

 

[NinthMusketeer]

12 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

Well...that, or they could have just changed points and redone warscrolls, the way they did last time. Which was underwhelming too, don't get me wrong, because they did a very lazy job with the points changes. But it clearly refutes the idea that their only option was to do something that didn't involve tweaking warscrolls or points, since they did both of those things last edition of the same document.

I strongly suspect feedback from that is what motivated this. At any rate, they could have just not created so many issues in the first place. It's more about what they would have done, and we didn't get this in the first quarter of 2021.

[yukishiro1]

I honestly think it's because the points for the next GHB are already sent to the printers and can't be changed, and it would be embarrassing to do a day-1 FAQ on something you're charging a lot of money for. Which is a terrible reason, but I can totally believe it's something GW would do. 

[mojojojo101]

15 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

I honestly think it's because the points for the next GHB are already sent to the printers and can't be changed, and it would be embarrassing to do a day-1 FAQ on something you're charging a lot of money for. Which is a terrible reason, but I can totally believe it's something GW would do. 

My retort to that would be, that if they are sending things to the printers more than 3 months out, why have they seemingly committed themselves to updating both 40k and AoS every 3 months?

[novakai]

9 minutes ago, mojojojo101 said:

My retort to that would be, that if they are sending things to the printers more than 3 months out, why have they seemingly committed themselves to updating both 40k and AoS every 3 months?

I think because their survey show that vast people (at least in the 40K community) want them to make updates more frequent then just twice a year. I bet the most people had voted for quarterly update as the sweet spot for them.

of course I think this came at a time where the entire 40K competitive community was not in a good place with Drukhari and Ad Mech having extremely high win rates. So they where probably pushing or desperate for faster updates at that point in time.

[yukishiro1]

17 minutes ago, mojojojo101 said:

My retort to that would be, that if they are sending things to the printers more than 3 months out, why have they seemingly committed themselves to updating both 40k and AoS every 3 months?

They have to send things to the printers more than 3 months in advance because they print everything in China. It's just the way it works. Historically they have sent stuff to the printers closer to 6 months before. Who knows, with the pandemic, the times may even be getting longer, not shorter. It wouldn't surprise me if they sent the 2022 GHB to the printers in January. 

I'm not defending it, it's a truly terrible way to update rules that will by its very nature always be out of date by the time it's released. But it's what GW does. 

[RuneBrush]

12 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

They have to send things to the printers more than 3 months in advance because they print everything in China. It's just the way it works. Historically they have sent stuff to the printers closer to 6 months before. Who knows, with the pandemic, the times may even be getting longer, not shorter. It wouldn't surprise me if they sent the 2022 GHB to the printers in January. 

I'm not defending it, it's a truly terrible way to update rules that will by its very nature always be out of date by the time it's released. But it's what GW does. 

As a random aside, pre-pandemic, I did hear rumours that GW were looking at potentially having their own printing plant in the UK.  No idea if that's still on the cards or not, but printing and the shipping of the product are a huge cost & delay in the grand scheme of things.  The tricky bit is most paper production is from China so there's some transportation required regardless.

[zilberfrid]

13 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

I honestly think it's because the points for the next GHB are already sent to the printers and can't be changed, and it would be embarrassing to do a day-1 FAQ on something you're charging a lot of money for. Which is a terrible reason, but I can totally believe it's something GW would do. 

This is it. It's a system that doesn't invalidate one letter of the books to be released. That it doesn't work is a different thing.

[NinthMusketeer]

So the suggestion is... GW knows these units are going to go up in points in three months hence, decides to nerf them in the meantime but without invalidating existing printed material... and that is bad?

[Skreech Verminking]

13 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

So the suggestion is... GW knows these units are going to go up in points in three months hence, decides to nerf them in the meantime but without invalidating existing printed material... and that is bad?

I’m guessing that is the reason.

 

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

1 hour ago, NinthMusketeer said:

So the suggestion is... GW knows these units are going to go up in points in three months hence, decides to nerf them in the meantime but without invalidating existing printed material... and that is bad?

It's bad for a few reasons.

The balancing mechanism of points increases already exists, but GW's publishing structure prevents the rules team from using it when it would be clearly appropriate. The update is "bad" in so far as it reveals structural difficulties GW has when it comes to providing regular balance updates. The inability to provide point or warscroll changes is a problem of GW's own making. They don't deserve praise for "cleverly" working around it.

Likely because of the upcoming General's Handbook, the rules team could not touch points or warscrolls and had to resort to a handicap system as a band-aid. A lot of people in this thread have given in-depth arguments as to why they think this system is badly designed. If you want to argue in good faith, you should engage with their points:

 

1. The update doesn't attempt to fix any of the core mechanical problems. The underlying imbalance is still there and the problem units are still as problematic as ever.
2. It instead tries to infulence the metric we most commonly measure balance by (win %) directly, in a reversal of cause and effect.
3. While the target audience for this fix is tournament/competitive players, it's not clear that they actually want to play with a handicap system. The update doesn't do anything for casual players, because their games will still feel unsatisfyingly imblalanced (see point 1).
4. Since the update doesn't make use of established avenues of balancing the game, it exemplifies or contributes to known design problems: Parasitic design, rules bloat, tech debt and non-scalability.

Edited March 30, 2022 by Neil Arthur Hotep

[yukishiro1]

7 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

So the suggestion is... GW knows these units are going to go up in points in three months hence, decides to nerf them in the meantime but without invalidating existing printed material... and that is bad?

No, I don't think so. If they were going up in points anyway they'd just do it now. That wouldn't invalidate anything in the new release, as long as the increases are less than or equal to the points values in the new release. There's no reason not to increase points now in that case, at least for the most problematic units.

The concern isn't about invalidating existing printed material - they had no problem doing that in the last balance patch where they dropped a bunch of points. The concern is about invalidating future printed material that they haven't charged people for yet.

There certainly would be no reason to go to all this trouble of coming up with a new balance lever that is going to complicate the game and have other unintended consequences if there was the option of just taking a few of the most problematic units and nerfing them in the way you were going to nerf them anyway in a few months. 

I think it's the more troubling possibility - that the new GHB *doesn't* touch the points values of many of these problematic units because GW didn't think they were a problem at the time they sent the book to the printer. So if they increased the points now, they'd have egg all over their faces when the GHB releases and the points go back down to their prior values. 

I suspect this is a way to retroactively CYA and act like they were planning this all along, and use that as justification for why the points on at least some of these units aren't changing in the new GHB - "they already have the bonus VPs factored in so we don't need to increase points!"

 

 

 

Edited March 30, 2022 by yukishiro1

[NinthMusketeer]

Some people's perspectives rely on a degree of assumed malice I don't think is very rational, or helpful for anyone. The rules designers aren't evil; they aren't part of corporate leadership. Instead they are a classic human mix of very smart and very dumb; obviously they are savvy to designing rules on paper and possess a great deal of creativity in doing so. But equally obviously they miss what should be obvious levels of tabletop potency/impotency those mechanics create.

This is not some sinister manipulation of community attitudes--this is the devs seeing that people don't like it when the printed material they paid money for is invalidated within 3 months. They have reached the conclusion that not every balance update should change rules, and maybe they can find a way to work around that.

It may not work. They may realize this approach isn't a good idea. But they are trying to do better and a failure to recognize that is actively working against improving AoS. By all means criticize the mechanic for not doing enough, or for failing to properly address issues, but focus those points on the rules themselves. Neil Arthur above does a great job of that. The people writing the rules have no control over how those rules are distributed, and may even hate the pay-only model as much as we do.

Ideally, we will get to a point where point updates are released for free online. This is a hell of a lot closer to that than we got this time last year; nothing.

Edited March 30, 2022 by NinthMusketeer

[novakai]

It depends on your perspective of are they trying doing better or are they just doing the bare minimum to get by on deadlines.

in 40K they seem to keep making the same mistake in their codexes without learning from any of it. The stuff that made Dark elder and Ad mech agregious keeps happening in the newer sexed now

in the end it probably GW doesn’t give much resource in the rule writing though  and that where lot of thing feel lacking.

[NinthMusketeer]

53 minutes ago, novakai said:

It depends on your perspective of are they trying doing better or are they just doing the bare minimum to get by on deadlines.

in 40K they seem to keep making the same mistake in their codexes without learning from any of it. The stuff that made Dark elder and Ad mech agregious keeps happening in the newer sexed now

in the end it probably GW doesn’t give much resource in the rule writing though  and that where lot of thing feel lacking.

That's how we know they aren't doing the bare minimum; we can all agree that while faulty at least AoS isn't on the same track as 40k!