Dead Scribe

It seems to me the person that wrote this book is definitely the same person that had a hand in things like skaven, FEC, and slaanesh, while you can literally see the line in the power level with other books like the gitz or khorne or even the mawtribe book.

Actually thats not true. I have a couple friends who played back then and the dwarf book was the third book released for 6th edition. Supposedly empire and dwarf gunlines were a thing in the tournament scene back then for a couple of years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_Army_Book You'll see dwarves had 2 books for 6th edition. The 2006 book and the January 2001 book (the third released book for that edition). Ravening Hordes was the general army list for all armies so was not a specific army book.

The only people that are miffed are the people that want things to be more balanced. Which seems to be a pretty small minority. The rest of the community seems to be pretty strong and I think that would indicate things are going great and other fantasy game systems on the market are pretty much doomed to be crushed because you can't stop the gw juggernaut. So largely agree.

I also don't really put a lot of stock in these statistics because it doesn't show you the full context of where the data comes from. I could have 10 bad players playing a really powerful faction and 10 great players playing an ok faction and the stats would show that the ok faction is OP because it has a 90-100% win ratio. Stats without context is meaningless.

Thats very virtuous of you. But there are people that do care about the game as the game, not for its atmosphere or enjoying beer & pretzel, and so it will be discussed often if it is found to be deficient.

I'm not sure how they would be useless. If they suffered attrition they are still essentially free points that are able to kill things and knock the enemy off of objectives.

9th Age happened because the game it supports went away. I don't know how viable a "9th age" for AOS would be because AOS is a living game backed by a company. Certainly an ITC could happen (and I know ITC is a thing for AOS its just not really caught on like it has for 40k) that could address some of the issues people seem to have. But casuals don't really pay attention to tournament packets either so I don't know how useful that would be?

I think you're the first person I've heard say that. Most people that talk about the time before GW had points describe it as a bad time where fan comps were breaking the game even worse than they are today.

Over lunch I had a talk with a few players at work. Something that I thought was interesting was that the consideration is that if all games are equally unbalanced (what is commonly put forth), the problem is not that people have a problem with balance, its that people have a problem with the rules, but are not wanting to change games. The theory being other games have less complaining because the people accept their own games balance issues but like the game.

That is once again arguing "true balance", which everyone knows cannot be done.

This is an expensive hobby. Most of us buy what we need to play. I don't think its reasonable to demand that players buy enough models to cover 3 ways to play. I have said that many times before - I only have what I need to play. I'm not spending more money on sub optimal models that I will need to pay someone to paint just so I can play sub optimally. If the rules for units weren't as skewed as they were, this wouldn't be as bad of an issue. The only way for me to currently make a weaker army would be to cut out two of my three keepers and then buy some demonette foot troops and have them painted up. The moment I have even two keepers, the casual players have a meltdown about waac and being "that guy". I don't think a game should push its players to do that.

Players that buy underpowered models because they look really cool but then find out later that they wasted money if they want to use it in a game are very affected as well. I see that weekly.

In our store the casual gamers get mad because most of us only have competitive lists and models so they only have like three people to play against unless they buy new models.

Got it thanks for the clarification. Yeah I can see that. If you like the person who is crushing you, you tend to not complain about it as much.

The context that it is being used is if you bring a triple keeper list, you are "that guy", so in many cases it is being used 100% to denote what type of list you are bringing.

What does it mean when you say "you cry and moan while taking off your toys"

Yeah. I think that whenever balance comes up it seems common people throw chess and perfect balance and how thats impossible in the mix, and I don't think most anyone is asking for perfect balance. I do think the post above is the correct answer as to why people stick around even though the balance isn't great. After investing so much money into GW, its hard to let it go and invest money somewhere else, especially when other games don't have the GW community that guarantees games, which kind of gives them leeway to be as lax as they want to be knowing people will stay anyway because going elsewhere is a giant financial risk for players. And because people have invested so much money and time into GW, they will handwaive bad balance and convince themselves its not that bad, and the people complaining about balance they dismiss as not being realistic or throw the chess analogy in to try to disprove that you can't have balance anyway. I've also been called "that guy" because I run triple keeper slaanesh list, being a competitive player. And the lead designer Ben Johnson has pictures of his triple keeper list on twitter and other social media outlets, so the explanation that you should just avoid "that guy" and the balance is fine, is fairly insulting, considering I'm using an army that the lead designer himself uses.

I think you answered the thread sir.

I am a tournament magic player and I agree with you mostly. However, when the designers introduce things like the summoning mechanics which are going to be off the wall with what they can do to break the game and frustrate players, I have to wonder why they would shrug their shoulders at imbalance and then simply add more things that are known to cause the game to break on top of that. Its one thing to realize that the games will never be balanced and cannot ever be balanced, its another to build foundations in your system that are based off of creating imbalance in the first place.

What do you tell the people quitting who don't want to keep up with the more powerful armies who don't want to have to keep buying models to keep up? The its balanced enough doesn't work for a lot of people, especially when they show up and have their semi casual army have to face off against one of our tournament armies (and my group only has a tournament army, so we can't "tone down"). This was the topic that sank my store's attempt at a narrative night and caused a lot of angry feelings. Do we tell those people the game is balanced enough and they should just be ok with auto losing? At that point is it really a game? That kind of feels like playing monopoly where one player gets 1000 when they pass go and a free property and the other players play by normal rules.

Lets also keep the phrase "perfect balance" out of the discussion since that was never one of the requirements or wishes. Its as much there in AOS as it is in Warcry. The designers do live streams where they talk excitedly about their tournament experience and the next armies they are building for the new tournament season.

I have never seen anyone run a slaves to darkness army so I'm doubtful that any player is going to beat most players with Slaves to Darkness. They are simply bad. If it were true that great players would win with any army regardless, you would see that in the armies that show up. You quite simply almost never see any bad armies, and all of the top players are typically also running top meta armies as well with a few notable exceptions running less effective but still powerful armies.

But then why is there always so much complaining about balance if balance is something not really considered or cared about?

That begs the question: if the game is considered by so many to be inferior or badly balanced, why then do so many people play it?

The double turn is something a lot of people complain about here as well and we have lost a lot of players because of it, but I don't think that has to do with imbalance so is probably off topic.