Saxon

There is a major problem with AOS (and frankly all Games Workshop products). New armies leave older ones behind and points costs for what units can do become silly fast. Example 1) boingrot bounderz vs. hexwraiths or black knights I've only played my sylvaneth a couple of times and i agree fully with this. I feel like Sylvaneth got left behind with mortal wound dishing and command point generating abilities. Every other new army seems to be able to spam CP's. Look at Gloomspite that were released at the same time, they can generate a potato amount of CP's. Also, whilst the groves are cool lore wise, they're very restrictive when it's hard to find a spell/command ability/battle trait combo that are all good. Generally 2 of the 3 are good and the 3rd is useless. I also feel like the bow Kurnoth are too swingy for their points and hit pretty poorly. 4+ for elite units that are 63 points each and have swingy damage is way over costed. They tend to show up in every list because they're the only ranged choice.

My biggest gripe with AOS is the minimum battleline armies. It doesn't help that the battleline requirements are pretty poor. You can play a legal army with under 200 points of foot sloggers and the rest with whatever you want. Whilst im not really all over the 40k rules in detail, the more restricted army selections make armies more balanced to some degree and prevent spam to the same level. This can only be good for sales by forcing lists to be more diverse?

CP Spam armies are really annoying with inspiring presence these days. Bravery means nothing. Going to have to start rolling out the shreiker host batallion on the Gloomspite gitz.

Maybe it just halves bravery? Putting demons/death down to 5 could be huge? Some of the elite armies might badly suffer (disproportionately so) if they auto-fail battleshock tests. Think Orruk Brutes or blightkings who are high wound elite models. The problem i have had though is that most armies have so many ways to ignore battleshock that debuffing bravery achieves nothing. Look at gloomspite gitz. Terrible across the board bravery but they CP spam so providing they don't outrun their heroes it's never a problem. Similarly, now that GW has made OBR who don't take battleshock tests, they would need to explain how this rule would work so i would imagine they won't go this way. If a command ability allows you to wipe units, NH would go to top meta again so no chance it will happen.

If you're not too concerned with being top meta, wait for nerfs on GW's shiny new toys/boosted armies. After Slaanesh and OBR took a hit the sales on second hand pages went nuts as people offloaded their armies. Might be able to get a cheap KO army in a few months depending on how much rage there is when WAAC players can't stomp everyone and lose their fun!

When you play those meta-chasers there is usually a 0% chance they will change their perfectly tailored list (from AOS shorts) to make the game more fair and fun for both parties. It's hard, you don't want to be that person that refuses to play a list you know is going to crush you, but at the same time its soul destroying spending months painting models you like the look to get crushed and it's just not a good time. The question i would have for those that think it's unintentional is that if they don't have enough time to come up with well tested rules, they're still frequently coming up with rules that are really unfun to play against. One way or another they're still coming up with poo rules. They should have enough experience to know what does and does not work given they've had 4 decades.......

You have a very positive view i will give you that. I struggle to give them credit when they appear to have absolutely no control over power creep resulting in significant nerfs which do a disservice to people buying their products.

Warcry is pretty great for this. Quick games, simple rules. It's a nice change. I can't for the life of me justifying $320 AUD for a single model (175 GBP). I see the UK sells the model for 120 GBP which is $220AUD. Thats a $100 markup. Sorry but that's disgusting.

What i do not get is that there is all this talk of long term goals and strategies in regards to GW's progress moving forward. Surely game maintenance would form part of this long term strategy to ensure the community negative noise remains at a low level. You look at 40k where they appear to have really pulled their socks up in light of serious noise about 8th edition. This does not gel well with intentionally creating poor rules which upsets part of their customer base. I feel like deliberate imbalance to push sales is a short term win and a long term loss. To use your analogy regarding dice, it would be like getting paid $10/day to rearrange dice but if you do it randomly and drop a few on the floor on the way, by the end of the week you'll only be getting $7.

The best thing about this is that there are only 2 outcomes, both of which many people really hate to admit. If GW don't deliberately create poor rules then they're doing it by accident which is probably even worse and indicates incompetence. As i said earlier in the thread, they've had 40 years to work on it so there are no excuses. Some of their recent output has been indefensible.

I understand where you are coming from but to suggest GW is deliberately designing rules to sell models fast is a controversial opinion on this forum!

It was broken in that it was really unfun to play against in addition to being a poor rule. How did GW think people would react to Petrifix rules? This is what perplexes me. Surely they knew the reaction would be negative?

Not always true. Someone had to come up with the rules for Lord Kroak. Kroak has to be one of the most unfun models to play against to have ever been created.

Amazing that someone I've never met knows more about myself than I do..... I used an example of a company in a topic about the company and its business practices? Im sorry but I really cannot understand what the issue is?

Plastic soldiers are an investment of money and time. The return on investment is happiness in one of the steps of the hobby be it building/modelling/painting or gaming or any combination of the above.

It's funny but i used to work for a company with similar beliefs. They made a fortune off the back of the mining boom here in Australia and were happy to ignore the negative noise on the basis that they were making a fortune and therefore as you say; enough people were happy to keep throwing money at them so why bother doing anything they didn't have to? I left about 2 years later. These days, they're massively struggling because they reached almost like a critical mass point where their business practices upset enough people for the negativity to get around to their loyal customers and their market share tanked hard. I feel like GW is going to reach this point eventually without change. It seems to have been close to this with 40k because from all reports they've actually worked really hard to address a lot of their problems. Would they be willing to put the effort into AoS given that comparatively its very new? Who knows. I too am aware that a massive shift away from GW has been predicted millions of times in GW's operating history and has never happened. As to whether or not they listen to me, i've voted with my money and scaled my investment into their models back by a lot. I've purchased 1 box of GW models this year whereas i have scaled up my investment into Warlord Games Bolt Action. I also got into warcry buying second hand models/sets. I feel like i should clarify my position in that i don't necessarily put the blame onto the designers so to speak, but GW as a whole entity. As you previously suggested and i fully agree, the designers likely don't get to choose their timelines for releases. They would do the best they can with the time they have. I instead put my blame onto GW as a corporation for allowing unbalanced rules to come out and not allowing the designers and testers enough resources to get it right (as far as practically possible). I don't expect perfection. But i also don't expect scenarios like Beasts of Chaos and Legions of Nagash to happen either from a high-level company.

My question for people who have no issues with the current state of balance would be how do you expect to convince someone who invested into an army like Beasts of Chaos to invest into a new army and continue to buy models? I can't see them getting a revamp for quite some time. Are you likely to have many fun games with such an uncompetitive army? I'd wager most people at least like to feel like they have a chance in each game they play.

Haha thanks for the summary 😆

This is a company that has existed for 4 decades, they should have a process sorted by now to address these issues and they should have enough data to know what does and doesn't work. Perhaps they haven't learnt anything? I would agree that its likely difficult given that designers probably don't choose release dates and thus their testing phase must fit into whatever the marketing guys allow them but these constant hard nerfs and printing sheets which address their changes through errata isn't great when they charge $70AUD for a battletome and $40AUD for warscroll cards. Worse still is armies going from competitive to garbage by the time you've finished painting the models (Legions of Nagash being a good example). I've seen many arguments on this site that GW only sells models and thus supporting armies through rules updates etc. is not their problem. I couldn't disagree more. Without rules GW products are just really expensive models. Support is what has put GW above competitors for a long time. I would love to know how many practice games the final Slaanesh, Tzeentch and OBR versions got because these factions have been nerfed really hard. You only have to look at the sub-forum for OBR on here to see the discontent with the revised rules. Is this an acceptable outcome for GW to upset a lot of players by gutting their army they likely haven't even finished painting? How do you get them hyped for the next release if you do this? Not getting a free pass means they don't get to brush it off as a mistake or human error like you were happy to throw out there. The only way GW gets better at making rules and balancing their games is feedback from people who wont make excuses for them all the time. Not that my experience in testing anything should really matter byut funnily enough in my field of work i actually did the field testing for moving soil profiling onto a tablet form. It took time but we can't use a sub-standard product because our clients are less forgiving than a lot of GW customers i guess......

Yes.... you do in my industry in addition to the above unfortunately....... The arguments in court go back and forth between known unknowns and unknown unknowns. It's as boring as it sounds. The joys of playing with dirt for a job. I brought up the above as a retort to the 'they're only human and they make mistakes' argument. Both are silly. They have teams of people meant to be play-testing these releases. Attributing it to human mistakes indicates either a lack of ability or a lack of effort in their job or a combination. That would be like going to a Michelin Star restaurant and getting a cold steak and having the chef say 'sorry i'm only human'. When GW's plastic kits cost what they do, their rules designers don't get a free pass when much cheaper games with reasonable sculpts can get it far closer to 'balanced'.

In addition to making things OP they also make things terribly underpowered as well, further reinforcing that their rules designers aren't on top of balance? Using cities as an example for anything is a long bow to draw when it was literally a way to shut people up with old models (myself being one of them). Beasts of Chaos are just atrocious. How can a company do so badly with a faction?

If you want to be the 'gold standard' of wargames selling plastic crack at an extortionate price then there is a reasonable expectation that you will be better than most with rules. My job has pressure too. If an excavation collapses i don't have the luxury of saying 'i'm human, I stuffed up', I go to court for negligence. I find this defense of some questionable rules to be rather lacking.

How fun is AoS in Australia. Stupid Covid prevented me from throwing my clothes away and stocking up on cheap plastic crack when i was in the UK in March 😆

It's harder to sell models when your rules are poo though

Oh cool so only double that again for my local currency exchange and then double that again because i'm in Australia haha