[Ossiarch Bonereapers, hideously overpowered?]

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.

[Why and If Age of Sigmar Is In A Great Spot Right Now]

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.

[Why and If Age of Sigmar Is In A Great Spot Right Now]

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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. 

 

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

7 hours ago, AaronWilson said:

I think the reason balance is posted about so much is the point that don't really care about it / accepted it's not balanced are busy enjoying the world of sigmar, enjoying hobby projects, enjoying beer and pretzel games, enjoy the game for it's atmospheric games and community and not posting online complaining about balance.

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

6 hours ago, michu said:

Summoning Sickness, like in MTG? But wouldn't make them useless in the wargame?

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

40 minutes ago, Kugane said:

At this point, I think when it comes to Games Workshop gaming systems, perhaps the community should take it into their own hands similar to the 9th age.

We have seen similar stuff happen in other games where people create new formats where certain stuff is allowed and other stuff is not in order to create a diverse new metagame. Some of these formats end up becoming so popular that they were eventually adopted as official formats.

If the community can put together a living rule system where points are adjusted, tested and additional rules or fixes to current rules are introduced, we might have something on our hands that all people can enjoy.

Like for the summoning problem, an possible fix could be something along the lines of "Call in the reinforcements." In which an army is allowed to deploy miniatures equal or less to the points exceeded by the opponent over a certain limit. Alternatively, something along the lines of. "A change of strategy" in which an army gets extra command points for each 50 points summoned by an opponent.

 

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?

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

7 minutes ago, michu said:

That's why there are 3 ways to play. If you want some people to stay in your community don't play only tournaments with best lists. Play some open and some narrative. There are really fun rules for smaller games in GHB2019. Some people will never be competitive. Create a place for them. You say non-competitive players have only three people to play with. Maybe you should play non-tournamental games with non-optimal lists with them ? Even with your competitive collections you can build some non-competitive lists. Different spells, weaker artefacts, add houserules, use msu units instead of hordes (20 clanrats instead of 40, no plague monks)... Diversity in game styles breads diversity in army lists. You're an MTG player so you probably know player psychographics - give Timmies a chance. Tournament games - optimal lists, non-tournament lists - slightly weaker lists. Use WD battlereports as inspiration.

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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.  

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

For most people, you play 40k/AoS or you don't play. This is especially true in the UK. Wargaming is expensive but at least with 40k/AoS you're almost guaranteed to find a game local to you. This I feel is why GW products do have such a notoriously loud, negative fandom - because a lot of those people would genuinely be happier taking their money elsewhere, the problem is they can't justify taking that step due to the above limitations. As a result, they continue to hope that GW actually improves their pretty horrendous balancing, or else they just don't wargame at all.

I think you answered the thread sir. 

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

1 hour ago, TheWilddog said:

I have played and still play a variety of table top war games and other competitive games like MTG (many at relatively high levels of competitive play), and honestly most every other system I have played exhibit the same imbalance that we currently see in AOS.  I have played dozens of Standard MTG formats over the years and in almost everyone there were 3-5 best decks that were truly competitive tier 1 and everything else would be dominated by, in fact the current standard format is dominated fairly heavily by 1 deck with most people playing it if they really want to win.  The same goes for War Machine. For most of the game's life each faction has had certain casters that dominated and 80 percent of the rest of the range was just left on the shelf. The CID structure has rotated what is good based on the set themes and the meta chases the top builds, while most other lists are relegated to non-competitive.  These other games spend way more time and resources than GW on game balance and rules writing and end up in similar spaces.  It is honestly the model of the modern competitive/collectible game, a constantly shifting unbalanced meta where new things are promoted to induce sales. This reality is only more frustrating for us as war gamers because unlike magic players we can not just move on to a new deck and recycle the old ones very easily, due to the hobby investment in painting and building the models.   

 

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

Lets also keep the phrase "perfect balance" out of the discussion since that was never one of the requirements or wishes.  

I've not seen that pivot. It's there in Warcry and Underworlds, but I don't see it in AoS.

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.  

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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.

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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?  

[Speculation: Will AOS ever be balanced or is this as good as it gets?]

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.