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New "balance" change gets everything wrong


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41 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

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!

Yet alway been in the same track as them. Then doing these quarterly update is because they doing it for 40K as well. We just have bias toward AoS because this is an AoS forum.

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14 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?

This isn't bad per se, but this implementation creates an extra system (higher complexity) to boost a metric (tournament win rates).

They could just as easily have changed the warscrolls or points values (as shown by killing off the Handgunners). This would not have created an extra system.

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Thanks for this Neil, it's a good way to keep the conversation on track. I'd like to engage with your points.

15 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

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.

"Fixing" mechanical problems is too blunt an instrument to achieve anything approaching balance, especially in the hands of GW. In almost every case, the result of such a 'fix' is that the unit goes extinct. (In the cases where that doesn't happen, it simply means that the 'fix' wasn't sufficient, the unit is still a problem, and more nerfs will be coming until it does disappear from play.) That provides a solution to the problem in a sense, but it's hardly a satisfying resolution - competitive and casual players alike have now had their existing armies ruined, and the meta will simply move on to the next overpowered combo of units.

15 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

2. It instead tries to infulence the metric we most commonly measure balance by (win %) directly, in a reversal of cause and effect.

This is a choice of perspective. Are Battle Tactics and Grand Strategies a 'reversal of cause and effect', because they also grant victory points? Or is killing Priority Target units an additional kill-based tactical objective that players can engage with, similar to Broken Ranks or Slay the Warlord?

15 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

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).

What competitive players want, generally speaking, is for their own advantages to be preserved or increased, and everyone else's advantages reduced or removed. High-level competitive list-building is never about evenly-matched forces in an equal contest, it's laser-focused on finding any source of competitive advantage and maximising it. Balance changes aren't about giving tournament players what they want, just keeping them in check.

A common sentiment from casual players (on these boards and elsewhere) is that competitive play has way too much influence over balance, and they hate it when tournament results are used to justify changes which wreck their armies when those armies weren't causing problems in their local scene. What this change does for casual players is leave them alone, and I really think it's important not to overlook that.

15 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

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.

The established avenues of balancing the game are demonstrably insufficient. The set of units which are considered 'competitively viable' is a vastly smaller cohort than the set of units in the game, and changing points or rules simply swaps units in and out of that set without meaningfully expanding it.

In light of that, some additional complexity is needed to make the choice of competitive units less clear-cut. When you're restricted to points and rules, all you can do is change "For the points, this is stronger than that" into "For the points, that is stronger than this". When you introduce another factor, you instead have "For the points, this is stronger than that, but..." and now the evaluation is far more open to interpretation and individual preference.

That ideal may not reflect the reality of this set of rules at this point, because it's still in its infancy and will need to grow and evolve over time. But breaking away from the rigid and artificial restriction of only changing points and rules provides the potential for a more nuanced set of balance mechanics, and I think that's a very positive change.

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8 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

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. 

I guess I just don't understand this point. They literally did just that in the prior update. And not a single person I can remember was complaining that the problem with that update was that it changed points - what people complained about is that it didn't go far enough in changing points. 

So why would they think that people would be against changing that printed material again 3 months later when they already did it once and the problem people had wasn't that it had been changed, it was that it hadn't changed enough?

And what printed material are you even talking about anyway here? The prior GHB was like 9 months ago, not 3 months ago. 

 

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25 minutes ago, yukishiro1 said:

I guess I just don't understand this point. They literally did just that in the prior update. And not a single person I can remember was complaining that the problem with that update was that it changed points - what people complained about is that it didn't go far enough in changing points. 

So why would they think that people would be against changing that printed material again 3 months later when they already did it once and the problem people had wasn't that it had been changed, it was that it hadn't changed enough?

And what printed material are you even talking about anyway here? The prior GHB was like 9 months ago, not 3 months ago.

I encountered a number of people lamenting how their recently purchased books were having pieces invalidated by that update, that's what I was referring to. This one doesn't actually change anything in the GHB, it simply adds extra. It is a subtle but important difference in that all of the text on the page remains valid.

Personally I would rather only see point updates twice a year anyways, quarterly is just more paperwork than I want to deal with. Let alone people who only play a game or two a month. Do a GHB a year, a 6-month point update, and two quarterly 'band-aid' updates between those. Band-aid updates being used to address items that are heavily disruptive and need something done immediately. This I see as an attempt to do that--I won't claim as to the quality of the attempt but I am glad it is being made.

The issue is if GW moves in the right direction and the only response is complaining about it, that sends a message that the customer base would have preferred nothing. When the community reduces communication to hyperbolic exclamations, it should really be no surprise we so often get pendulum-esque fixes back.

I suppose at the end of the day I just can't get mad at this update no matter how flawed it may be, because I don't really feel like the community overall deserves better.

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48 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

The issue is if GW moves in the right direction and the only response is complaining about it, that sends a message that the customer base would have preferred nothing. When the community reduces communication to hyperbolic exclamations, it should really be no surprise we so often get pendulum-esque fixes back.

I suppose at the end of the day I just can't get mad at this update no matter how flawed it may be, because I don't really feel like the community overall deserves better.

I think when you start blaming the customers for GW doing a bad job that's getting into silly territory. It isn't the responsibility of "the community" to hold GW's hand and make sure its feelings aren't hurt or that it doesn't get triggered and throw its toys out of the pram. GW's a company worth billions with a cutthroat focus on their bottom line and extracting as much money as is humanly possible from its customers. It doesn't need to be treated like a sensitive child to make sure it keeps up its motivation, and it isn't going to be motivated by people saying nice things about it. It isn't doing quarterly updates because it's been so inspired by what great people there are in its community and by some altruistic desire to "give back," it's doing them because a judgement was made that there is more money to be made by giving the customers what they want in terms of more frequent rules updates. Giving them a participation trophy and telling them how great it is that they're trying is counterproductive if what we really want is for them to do a good job in the first place; if you do that the message that goes through is "people like this! more of the same!" not "we need to do better next time."

Criticism should be constructive, to be sure, but when we start talking about how we can't or shouldn't criticize GW because it'll upset them and then we can't have nice things that feels like we're talking about a relationship with a socially dysfunctional family member, and I really don't think there are any benefits to be had from that. 

This is sort-of off topic so I don't want to belabor this any further, except to say that if I really felt like the community didn't deserve any better than what GW gives them, that would probably make me question why I was in the hobby anyway. The wonderful community is what makes this game worth playing. They deserve the very best game money can buy (especially considering how much money is required to buy it these days!). 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by yukishiro1
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4 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

The issue is if GW moves in the right direction and the only response is complaining about it, that sends a message that the customer base would have preferred nothing. When the community reduces communication to hyperbolic exclamations, it should really be no surprise we so often get pendulum-esque fixes back.

I suppose at the end of the day I just can't get mad at this update no matter how flawed it may be, because I don't really feel like the community overall deserves better.

It sends the message they did something wrong and, I assure you, designers usually have a thick skin since we're quite used to getting harsh feedback. It is a part of being a designer. It is an extremely important part too since most designers hate designing bad things. Especially since if we don't get the right feedback whoever is our boss will continue to make us build on bad design and the worse it gets. Again, from a designer perspective it is incredibly frustrating to not know what works and what doesn't.

GW isn't a small-time company trying to make ends meet. They charge a premium and having some kind of Stockholm Syndrome relationship where you are thankful for bread crumbs isn't good enough. When you, in this case GW, charge a lot of money for rules and models it is reasonable to expect quality in return.

Finally, stop using the design team as a shield for GW. Might seem like a good idea to stand up for them but in actuality you're standing up for corporate. It is their decisions which you validate and now the design team has to work even harder with yet another layer of rules because, like @Neil Arthur Hotep also noted, they were not allowed to make the changes which were actually needed cause it would hurt GW's bottom line.

If we silence ourselves to risk not hurting GW's feelings you're making the job of the designers even harder. Especially since Dunning-Kruger effect is usually strong with management and execs so they'll delude themselves into believing they know game design now. Few things suck more as a designer than someone in management giving you idiotic advice or direction. You will usually have to have to cobble together some Frankenstein solution which they will take credit for if it works or blame you if does not (word of advice for designers, document who said what and why you're doing X or Y. Do not let anyone coast on your designs or use you as a scapegoat... And it is also a great way to remain objective in a conflict, i.e. talk about a specific thing/behaviour rather than a person).

So I'd turn it around and say GW gets the community they deserve. They can do a lot better. Unfortunately, GW would rather deliver a worse game than ease up on the profits. Sure, they're a business but if that's the argument then why should we take into account their feelings? I mean, if they're excused for treating us like walking talking moneybags surely we should be able to criticise their callous and anti-consumer practices without having to tip-toe around the risk of offending an imaginary game designer?

TL;DR: By defending poor decisions by GW you're hurting the designers since now they gotta juggle even more layers of poor design on even tighter deadlines. They're professional designers, they know how to handle feedback (in any form) and they want to make the best game they can. Like yourself, I doubt the designers themselves deliberately mishandles the game due to laziness. My perspective is that without our voice when we dislike something the designers won't have a leg to stand on when arguing their designs to their respective decision-makers.

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Both of you have me quoted, but I can't really defend the points you are criticizing since they are not my own and I don't agree with them. Perhaps these is a different post in this thread you could quote, that expresses the views you are responding to? There are a lot of valid points, they just aren't addressing what I said.

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10 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

This is sort-of off topic so I don't want to belabor this any further, except to say that if I really felt like the community didn't deserve any better than what GW gives them, that would probably make me question why I was in the hobby anyway. The wonderful community is what makes this game worth playing. They deserve the very best game money can buy (especially considering how much money is required to buy it these days!).

Well you looked at my post, distilled it down to a basic 'GW white knight' concept, and made a generic response without consideration for nuance.

GW looked at the tourney statistics, distilled it down to the top warscrolls, and made a generic balance update without consideration for nuance.

Karma's a ******.

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1 hour ago, NinthMusketeer said:

Well you looked at my post, distilled it down to a basic 'GW white knight' concept, and made a generic response without consideration for nuance.

GW looked at the tourney statistics, distilled it down to the top warscrolls, and made a generic balance update without consideration for nuance.

Karma's a ******.

I think you are taking things unnecessarily personally here. I didn't say you were a white knight, and I didn't make a generic response. I responded to the exact thing you wrote, which was that you didn't really think the community really deserved better than they are getting, and that we needed to be positive because otherwise GW would give us nothing or a knee-****** reaction next time instead. I don't agree with either of those points, but that doesn't mean I'm attacking you by saying so. 

Attempting to draw some kind of karmic equivalence between some random person responding to a post on a message board and actions by a multinational corporation worth billions is, again, just a bit silly. We should hold GW to higher standards than random people on message boards. I would hope you would hold me to higher standards if I was getting paid hundreds of millions a year to post here, and I would hope that GW spent more time and effort on their balance update that I spent writing that post. 😁

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On 3/17/2022 at 2:39 PM, Enoby said:

That's not to say that AoS isn't or is in a bad state, but I think that it's in a 'fine' state from a casual perspective. However, personally, I think it can feel frustratingly shallow at the moment when you try to get more deeply involved in the game.

I think it's 100% the opposite of this. 

In our smaller, casual gaming group of 6 active players and some who play incredibly sporadic, the army spread is such that player A's army will brutalize player B's army almost every time, while losing to player C. AoS balancing seems to largely boil down to bad matchups limiting certain factions or making some flourish in the meta.  

Our LRL player is already sick and tired of the new deepkin for instance and why wouldn't he be... That book  just seems to be written to hard counter his army... And that's absolutely poisonous to smaller casual communities of just some mates getting together for a game. It'll look ok in win-rates in meta data probably, but it blows chunks if you have regular opponents. 

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5 minutes ago, Elmir said:

In our smaller, casual gaming group of 6 active players and some who play incredibly sporadic, the army spread is such that player A's army will brutalize player B's army almost every time, while losing to player C. AoS balancing seems to largely boil down to bad matchups limiting certain factions or making some flourish in the meta.  

Our LRL player is already sick and tired of the new deepkin for instance and why wouldn't he be... That book  just seems to be written to hard counter his army... And that's absolutely poisonous to smaller casual communities of just some mates getting together for a game. It'll look ok in win-rates in meta data probably, but it blows chunks if you have regular opponents. 

I think this is true when people have limited collections and so their army tends to look the same every time. Like there are definitely LRL lists that can play against Deepkin. But that isn't relevant to someone who doesn't have those models available to them. 

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3 hours ago, yukishiro1 said:

I think you are taking things unnecessarily personally here. I didn't say you were a white knight, and I didn't make a generic response. I responded to the exact thing you wrote, which was that you didn't really think the community really deserved better than they are getting, and that we needed to be positive because otherwise GW would give us nothing or a knee-****** reaction next time instead. I don't agree with either of those points, but that doesn't mean I'm attacking you by saying so. 

Attempting to draw some kind of karmic equivalence between some random person responding to a post on a message board and actions by a multinational corporation worth billions is, again, just a bit silly. We should hold GW to higher standards than random people on message boards. I would hope you would hold me to higher standards if I was getting paid hundreds of millions a year to post here, and I would hope that GW spent more time and effort on their balance update that I spent writing that post. 😁

But you didn't respond to what I wrote--you took a specific piece out of context in order to respond to a sentiment I wasn't making. And you are still doing so here, even after I said that was what's happening. The entire argument you are opposing is one I never made.

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4 hours ago, Elmir said:

I think it's 100% the opposite of this. 

In our smaller, casual gaming group of 6 active players and some who play incredibly sporadic, the army spread is such that player A's army will brutalize player B's army almost every time, while losing to player C. AoS balancing seems to largely boil down to bad matchups limiting certain factions or making some flourish in the meta.  

Our LRL player is already sick and tired of the new deepkin for instance and why wouldn't he be... That book  just seems to be written to hard counter his army... And that's absolutely poisonous to smaller casual communities of just some mates getting together for a game. It'll look ok in win-rates in meta data probably, but it blows chunks if you have regular opponents. 

That is exactly the sort of thing that keeps killing matched play leagues at my flgs. People feel like one out of every three games is a landslide in their favor, one is a landslide against them, and one is a decent game. I've said before that calling the system "matched" to begin with is a joke. Players still need to self-balance or stumble on good matchups by blind luck. Though finding an even matchup could still be ruined by a 1-2 double.

 

Taking this back out to the bigger picture,  so much of that is in the fundamentals of how GW goes about releasing content in the first place and balance patches aren't going to address that. Which gets back to my original point of criticizing a balance update for not addressing procedural flaws is unproductive, because it was never going to.

If the devs were skilled enough to sort out the bad feedback and the good, to break down the causality and nuance of the situation they would never have released things like this in the first place. They should do better, because making a better game is in their own best interest, and the company, and the stockholders. So when the community floods the field with muddy, hyperbolic feedback, they aren't providing it to skilled devs who can shift out the gems, they are feeding it to devs with a demonstrated lack of understanding torward the game's complex interactions.

Put simply; when the community gives bad feedback, that has a negative impact on the resulting balance updates. Is that the only factor? Does it make things the community's fault? Does it mean the GW devs don't care? No, of course not. Those are exactly the sorts of hyperbolic straw men that reinforce the state the game is in, because they drown out criticism which is actually constructive.

If the community wants better we can affect that by being better ourselves. It isn't about what's fair or what things should be, it is about the hard reality of what they are.

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I dunno, I actually think the devs do a pretty good job with AOS. 40k is an absolute dumpster fire, there's no arguing that, but AOS right now is in probably the best place it ever has been. No faction win rates over 60% is, by GW's standards, quite good. My read of AOS is the biggest problem is lack of time put into balancing. Both the last balance patch and this one are more or less right in terms of what they targeted, the problem with both is just that they didn't put in the time and effort to really go the distance. When I say they both feel like Friday Afternoon Specials I don't mean that they're incompetent, but rather that the effort wasn't put in. And that may well be the product of things beyond the control of the devs themselves. We know from the last year of reveals that GW game developers are underpaid and overworked and even expected to create new stuff for the company on their own time. In that environment a Friday Afternoon Special starts to feel justified.

My read on AOS is that the real problem is that the suits aren't giving the game developers the resources they need, not that the developers are fundamentally clueless like they seem to be over on the 40k team.  I wouldn't be surprised if the expectation of doing quarterly balance passes was simply thrust upon the team as an additional requirement on top of their already overburdened job duties, without any extra resources being allocated and without any diminishment of their other work expectations, and with unworkable restrictions like not being able to adjust points in this one because it would make GW's print model look bad to adjust points now and then have them contradicted by the points that have already been sent to the printer. If that's true, I don't really blame them for taking the low effort path, and the only way that's going to change is if people demand higher effort and the suits take notice of it and decide that investing a little more will generate them higher profits. 

For example, does anyone really think that it's the devs that want to adjust points via a printed document that has to be to the printers 3-6 months before release? I can't imagine that's the case. That's surely a suits decision, not a developer decision. I can't imagine the developers don't agree with the vast majority of the community on how silly it is to try to do points adjustments 3-6 months ahead of time. Nobody can seriously think that's a good way to do things, it has to be an economically-motivated diktat from the bean counters. And the only way to get that changed is to convince the bean counters they've counted the beans wrong. 

 

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1 hour ago, yukishiro1 said:

My read on AOS is that the real problem is that the suits aren't giving the game developers the resources they need

I agree. I can even see the devs wanting to include some points adjustments in this kind of update and being told not to because the GHB is coming soon enough.

However, I also think the Priority Target list was most likely an idea that they came up with and wanted to implement on its own merit, not just because they didn't have anything else to put in their mandatory update. Having a third balancing factor in addition to points and rules is a smart play. Having that factor be something that you can adjust independently of the imposed restrictions of the publishing timeline is just a nice bonus.

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It sounds like the intended effect; an army not utilizing the meta choices having an extra edge against one that is. Must have been pretty close too, close enough that the increased points/reduced capabilities no doubt coming for megas would have still made the difference even if conventional balancing had been used.

That's the nature of balance, the people running the best things are going to lose out. Personally I'd rather lose from a balance update than win but be left wondering if I did so from my own skills or just from running OP stuff. But that's just my perspective and it is one of many ways to view things.

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On 3/31/2022 at 5:10 PM, yukishiro1 said:

I dunno, I actually think the devs do a pretty good job with AOS. 40k is an absolute dumpster fire, there's no arguing that, but AOS right now is in probably the best place it ever has been. No faction win rates over 60% is, by GW's standards, quite good. My read of AOS is the biggest problem is lack of time put into balancing. Both the last balance patch and this one are more or less right in terms of what they targeted, the problem with both is just that they didn't put in the time and effort to really go the distance. When I say they both feel like Friday Afternoon Specials I don't mean that they're incompetent, but rather that the effort wasn't put in. And that may well be the product of things beyond the control of the devs themselves. We know from the last year of reveals that GW game developers are underpaid and overworked and even expected to create new stuff for the company on their own time. In that environment a Friday Afternoon Special starts to feel justified.

My read on AOS is that the real problem is that the suits aren't giving the game developers the resources they need, not that the developers are fundamentally clueless like they seem to be over on the 40k team.  I wouldn't be surprised if the expectation of doing quarterly balance passes was simply thrust upon the team as an additional requirement on top of their already overburdened job duties, without any extra resources being allocated and without any diminishment of their other work expectations, and with unworkable restrictions like not being able to adjust points in this one because it would make GW's print model look bad to adjust points now and then have them contradicted by the points that have already been sent to the printer. If that's true, I don't really blame them for taking the low effort path, and the only way that's going to change is if people demand higher effort and the suits take notice of it and decide that investing a little more will generate them higher profits. 

For example, does anyone really think that it's the devs that want to adjust points via a printed document that has to be to the printers 3-6 months before release? I can't imagine that's the case. That's surely a suits decision, not a developer decision. I can't imagine the developers don't agree with the vast majority of the community on how silly it is to try to do points adjustments 3-6 months ahead of time. Nobody can seriously think that's a good way to do things, it has to be an economically-motivated diktat from the bean counters. And the only way to get that changed is to convince the bean counters they've counted the beans wrong.

Things like Stormdrake Guard should never have made it to print as they are because it is immediately apparent they are broken just from reading the warscroll. If something like that happened once it would be a fluke, but it has happened countless times. There is no 'we didn't have enough time to test it!' excuse for that. It took all of two minutes for me and countless others to realize that point cost was not appropriate. And they are far, far, FAR from the only example.

Just last page I was being criticized for letting the devs off the hook for design mistakes (an entirely valid criticism, albeit against a sentiment I did not have), but a three paragraph post amounting to 'no, it's all GW corporate's fault' racks up half a dozen likes in less than a week. That's the level of thought the community is supporting right now, and that's the level of thought that goes into balance. It isn't good for things to be that way, for anyone involved, but one must admit there is a certain degree of poetic balance to it.

 

Edit: I do know this is going to come off like sandpaper to a lot of people, it can be remarkably difficult to convey deadpan in text.

Edited by NinthMusketeer
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