Saxon
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Posts posted by Saxon
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My biggest gripe with AOS is the minimum battleline armies.
12 hours ago, Enoby said:I think people would like to be able to take whatever they like and still feel as if their army is capable. At the end of the day, while it can be a fun challenge to play using bad models, it's not fun when you actually want to use those models in an even game.
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?
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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.
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6 hours ago, EnixLHQ said:
Oh man, a legit fear mechanic? What would that look like?
We'd need to be able to make Bravery 10 units susceptible while not making anything less so absolutely broken that losing a single model is an insta-wipe. Even if it came through spells, I'd hate to break out a super-reliable -5 Bravery cast that puts any non-Death or demon army in the negatives. Worse, I'd hate to get a super UNreliable spell.
Maybe stackable -1 auras? So the more units we put in play against a single opponent unit the more we reduce their Bravery? Still only comes into -1 to -3 territory on its own. How about everything stays the same, but the aura gets stronger over turns? Aura of Dread now reduces Bravery by the current turn number, so the longer the game goes on the worse it is to deal with us. Maybe it even grows by a couple inches each turn, too. So it starts at 6" and ends at 14".
These still wreck low-bravery enemies, probably out of proportion.
Maybe making failing Battleshock a Command Ability? Like for a CP we can force a failure of an enemy's battleshock test. For example, the enemy just lost 5 models in a 10-man unit. We spend a CP and now it's an auto-failure for them (the CA would overwrite Inspiring Presence or other Battleshock-preventing or passing abilities). Since it's a failure their models lost now becomes the number of models that run. So another 5 run and the unit is lost. Against a 3-man unit of elites you can take one out, spend a CP and force another out. Or if you got 2 the CP completes the wipe. This would make it a tactical choice, but not help any of our other abilities that depend on a Bravery value to do things.
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.
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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!
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10 hours ago, Greybeard86 said:
Yep! I guess the argument was about the "dominant" reason for what we see. Some thing it is (bad) luck, others that it is actually a concerted effort to have the "spotlight" on certain armies and units at a time.
Then there was an initial discussion on whether the "meta" is that strong anyway, in the sense of whether it matters that much for gameplay.
My stance:
Meta shifts are by design and balance affects everyone, not only tournament players.
There are ways to weather the storm (agreeing on lists with people beforehand, house rules) but I wish we didn't have to resort to that. Of course, this is one side of the hobby, as we know, and currently I derive most of my pleasure from painting and reading.
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.......
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5 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:
I should retract my previous arguments somewhat and say they are focused on AoS, because I only have half a grip on the insanity of 40k rules development right now. I also completely agree that by allowing imbalance/low-quality rules to continue as they do there is a sacrifice of long term gain for short term results.
But I do want to give GW credit where it is deserved; over the past few years the number of options in building armies for AoS have skyrocketed but (IMO) balance has remained roughly at the same level overall. That is an improvement in a manner of speaking, at a sufficient rate that increasing options did not drag down balance.
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.
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12 hours ago, Beastmaster said:
Maybe skirmish games would be more up your alley?
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.
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13 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:
That's where the actual intent comes in. Yes they are bad, and we can see they know it (as opposed to Kirby years...), but WHY don't they overhaul things? IMO, because they don't feel the effort is worth the reward. They obviously lose players due to crappy balance, but they obviously generate sales from crappy balance as well. There is no need for a plan to rotate units on some wheel of OP/UP, they can just continue not being very good at balance and the meta will shake up frequently enough without them changing anything.
Imagine being given a hundred d6s and being told "if you arrange these to all be the same number I will give you $10, but if you arrange them to look random, I will give you $10." The suggestion that GW intentionally controls the meta is saying that they would individually place all hundred of those dice to look random. Personally I think they are happy to roll them.
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.
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13 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:
Yeah, when evidence clearly contradicts a conclusion it tends to be... 'controversial'.
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.
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16 minutes ago, Marcvs said:
I suppose it goes like this:
IF expected $$$ from people buying the "new strong thing" > expected $$$ lost to people NOT buying stuff because of negative experience
THEN release new strong thing
(of course I know I am simplifying, hope that's clear)
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!
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8 hours ago, Kasper said:
I agree with you to a certain degree, but as an example Petrifex giving a blanket +1 save isnt inherently broken imo (it is an incredible buff no doubt). It is the combination of insane save characteristic, with full rerolls for little to no resource cost and with extremely high damage output that made an additional +1 problematic. Ontop of this you have regeneration abilities that further compounds the issue and creates a really terrible player experience.
S2D is a pretty good example of a book with a few tricks and strong abilities, like the Khorne DP, but it doesnt cause issues because they arent murdering you (apart from Marauders, ****** those guys) with brutal damage or near impenetrable units. So even if they print powerful abilities, they are not inherently broken.
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?
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5 minutes ago, Kadeton said:
Whenever people ask "Why don't the designers just write better rules/fix imbalances/do the obvious thing?" the answer should always be "Because GW doesn't enable them to," and not any other reason.
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.
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2 minutes ago, Feii said:
You are lying to yourself by using the corporate language to justify your hobby and having a good time. You don't need to do that and reduce your primary motivation into the realm of efficiency.
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?
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1 minute ago, Feii said:
Please just stop using the word investment like that. Plastic soldiers are not stock markets.
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.
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1 minute ago, Kadeton said:
I'd say the opposite. They've learned exactly how much effort to put into their releases in order to minimise their overheads while still satisfying their customers. There's literally no reason (beyond personal pride on the part of the developers - but again, they don't make these business decisions) to put in more effort than that. If people are happy to buy armies with wonky balance going on four decades, then clearly people just don't care enough about balance to look elsewhere.
If they charge too much for you to be happy with the quality of the products they produce, then just stop buying their products. Support their competitors instead! I stopped buying GW stuff ages ago, because their prices are way too high for me to get a sense of value from them.
My point, overall, is that getting mad at GW for the quality of their products, or at their designers for not somehow managing to produce perfect rules in the limited time GW allows them, is a fundamentally pointless stance when GW are still posting record profits. You and I can say they should do better, but why should they listen?
Is it an acceptable outcome? Apparently! Tons of people are still buying GW models.
I make "excuses" for the designers, because most of the commenters here have absolutely no idea of the challenges of balancing a complex game. People call them lazy, incompetent, malicious, and so on all the time. I think that's totally unfair. They're just people doing their best under the circumstances.
I don't make any excuses for GW as a corporate entity, because I think their business practices harm their games and the community. But that doesn't mean I can ignore the fact that vast numbers of people around the world are queuing up to throw money at them, and that they have absolutely no reason to behave differently until those people stop doing that.
I honestly wish that GW customers would be less forgiving. I just don't think there's any point in railing at GW about it when they're unable to hear you over the roaring river of cash flowing into Nottingham, and I hate it when people go off at games designers. I just support other companies instead.
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.
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Just now, 123lac said:
Pretty much.
In terms of balance, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to be capable of having a meta where the lowest armies sit at 45% win rate and the top tier armies sit at 55% win rate.
I mean compare any of the top tier factions to Beasts of Chaos. It's just too unfair to those who are invested in the bottom tier factions.
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.
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2 minutes ago, JackStreicher said:
To summarize: GW, please stop f-ing up army books by making them trash-tier or god tier. Playtest more, listen to the testers and make every army simple middle-tier. Thx.
Also, stop f-ing up the prices, really, just stop.
We should write an open letter as the TGA Community, this might have an effect eventually
Haha thanks for the summary 😆
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22 minutes ago, Kadeton said:
Or a testament to the difficulty of the challenge (which is another way of saying "a lack of ability", while recognising that lacking said ability is in no way unusual or unexpected). I wonder if you've actually been involved in any games development before?
I help manage the community forums for Wyrd miniatures, and they have done multiple large-scale closed and open beta tests of their rules. I've seen firsthand the combined efforts of teams of hundreds of volunteers putting thousands upon thousands of hours purely into balance testing over periods of eighteen months or more, and on release there were still errors, unintended rules interactions and balance problems that snuck through. It's simply a fact that when developing such complex systems, at some point you just have to bite the bullet and call it "ready for release". No matter how much time and effort you spend on it, it will literally never be "finished".
GW's decisions on when to release a given set of rules (in whatever their current state of balance might be) will, I guarantee, not be made by the designers of those rules. That's a marketing process, not a development one.
A "free pass" for getting out of what, exactly? Are you proposing to punish them in some way?
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......
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12 minutes ago, Kadeton said:
You don't go to court for making a mistake. Everybody knows that mistakes happen. You go to court to determine whether you, as the person responsible for safety, deliberately ignored or circumvented the procedures that are in place to help ensure that harm is minimised when mistakes happen. Imagining that an industrial disaster and minor balance issues in a wargame represent equivalent danger to human lives is insane.
However, if you believe that GW have caused you measurable harm as a result of their negligence in failing to write better rules, you are entirely within your rights to take them to court too.
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'.
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30 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:
So why aren't Sons of Behemat very good, exactly?
Why are the large majority of Lumineth units not overpowered at all?
Why do Saurus remain the worst part of the Seraphon battletome and Slaan the best?
Why are skyriggers STILL bad?
Why is Tzeentch STILL overpowered, for the same reasons?
Why aren't Slaves to Darkness part of dominating the current meta?
Why are the OP elements of OBR limited to a fraction of the available models?
Why were Cities, Fyreslayers, and Khorne not major pieces of the meta when they hit?
Why is the Skaven battletome a skew of units running from OP all the way to terrible? Gloomspite? Beasts of Chaos? Stormcast?
If GW is making new stuff OP to sell it, why are the majority of new model kits not OP?
If GW is switching what's good and bad to promote sales, why are so many good things staying good and so many bad things still bad?
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?
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31 minutes ago, Kadeton said:
Again, it's not an either-or situation. The designers at GW aren't Machiavellian manipulators expertly milking the unsuspecting public for every last cent, and they're not drooling half-wits bashing randomly at keyboards. They're just ordinary people trying to navigate complex and contradictory pressures in their jobs. They're beholden to their employers to continue to promote sales and the overall success of the game, and they're also trying to make a game they can be proud of so they can go home satisfied at the end of their workday. Being human, they sometimes ****** up. There's really nothing more to it.
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.
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1 minute ago, Slayerofmen said:
Barring having to pay an extra 100 dollars after the exchange rate from UK to aud to buy a mega giant my position is less about the price and more and the book feeling lacklustre, AoS has too many examples already of books coming out with what id argue is bare minimum for them. It should have hit with more unit choices
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 😆
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21 minutes ago, Icegoat said:
All this arguing over whether the imbalance is intended is foolish.
GW exists to sell models. Lord kroak is currently sold out on the uk store.
There is a lot more proof its intentional, than that they all a bunch of inept dullards in nottingham which is definitely not the case.
It's harder to sell models when your rules are poo though
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On 10/24/2020 at 9:18 PM, PiotrW said:
Hey guys, the box up for pre-order. And the price is 125 GBP, if you're interested
I told ya so!
Let's go and buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuy...
(throws money at GW)
Oh cool so only double that again for my local currency exchange and then double that again because i'm in Australia haha
Sylvaneth really need some love
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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.