thubivision

Mine was just delivered, probably the last person to get theirs who preordered direct from GW. I guess that's what I get for living in the rural backwater of San Francisco. Lesson learned I suppose.

Did you place your Dominion order from GW directly? Yes Did you have it shipped to your home as opposed to a store? Yes When did you order? Two hours after preorders went live on the 19th Did you get yours yet? No. Got notification last night from UPS that it shipped, but according to the tracking info only the label has been created. I'm not expecting it until next week which is a bummer because I have time to paint this weekend and, more importantly, motivation.

Who says they don't? At the end of the day, there's one person responsible. Otherwise how would you settle disputes? Design by committee isn't typically thought of as a positive. It's all subjective (otherwise, we wouldn't be having this discussion) and who's to say that one person's opinion is better than anybody else's? There could be 10 people involved, bouncing ideas off each other and reviewing everything but at the end of the day it's ultimately one person's responsibility. Another personal anecdote: I was the lead and I had tasked another designer with creating the weapon progression for gungame. I didn't agree with what he came back with and gave my feedback. He chose not to consider it. We had some heated debate. At the end of the day, what kind of leader would I be if I pulled rank and made him do what I wanted? What am I paying him for? He was hired, he was tasked with the responsibility because he's the expert, and for better or worse he owns it. It would certainly be easier if there was an objective right answer I could have shown him, but that's not how design works. Yeah, I have absolutely zero insight into how GW runs things and it's completely possible that it's a total debacle. Relying on print and long lead times for game balance is pretty outdated and frankly unacceptable in 2021. I'm not necessarily trying to defend the company, just some of the designer hate triggered me.

I get that the new points can be disappointing, but boy do I have a lot of empathy for the GW designers. I’m a video game designer who works on the best selling fps franchise (three words, hesitant to fully out myself). On multiple releases I’ve both been in charge of tuning weapons and managing/leading the person tuning weapons. I’ve been reading the multiple threads around here and am sort of getting PTSD. I’m just gonna train of thought, so apologies for the rambling. Also, I’m not trying to minimize or take away from anybody’s feelings. I’ve been playing WHFB since 5th edition and 40k since 3rd; I know how bad it feels when the rules change from under you and makes your army not as good as it was. I have no idea how GW works, but where I work, the community guys are pretty separate from the designers, both physically and with day to day stuff. When they come to design with questions or clarifications, it’s usually a pain for the designer to take the time to try and justify/explain why things are they way they are. There’s also a “once bitten twice shy” that can come from trying to interact with the community (even through an intermediary). So once we have a game go live, the community guys will trawl the internet and come up with concerns the community has and try to get responses from design. One thing that the feedback almost universally has in common is that none of it comes from looking at the game holistically and trying to better the game as a whole. Any feedback or suggestion originates from a variation of “I use thing X, and thing Y just beat me. It couldn’t possibly be my fault, so thing Y is too powerful and/or thing X is too weak.” Another issue is that things that may seem simple or quick from the outside aren’t. I saw something in one of these threads about incorrect points in a 40k codex with the comment of “all they had to do was change one number in one document and put out a FAQ.” I get how it could seem like that, but with a big company it’s anything but. Pushing changes can be pricey, so there’s a desire to group them together. There’s translators that the documents have to go through. The web guys have to push it live. And that’s only after the changes are made. Presumably before it gets to that point they’re reviewed and, well, tested. Which probably makes you think of something cynical regarding GW’s play testing. Maybe their process does suck, who knows. I can tell you this from my work experience. We playtest the game every single day for 2-3 years. Dozens of full matches a day. When it gets closer to ship, we have an army of QA testers playing the game. We have open Alphas and Betas. During all of this we collect data to analyze and make informed decisions. Roughly 10 minutes after the game goes live, there’s literal orders of magnitude more data than we generated in the entire dev cycle. This alone can expose things that nobody else noticed and may seem super obvious in hindsight. Perceived strength/weakness is also a real thing that can cloud people’s eyes from reality. I’ve severely nerfed overpowered weapons and not seen usage drop. Conversely, I’ve made weak weapons completely broken OP and not seen usage move. And this is with spending a lot of time to create meticulously detailed patch notes to communicate those changes (add another to the “why bother?” column.) Once a community believes something to be at a certain strength, it’s hard to dislodge that no matter what changes. I suspect that competent Hedonites players will be very successful as their opponents won’t have a lot of experience against them and will underestimate their strengths. More-so if points are adjusted down. Anyway, I feel bad for the designers. I think the worst feeling in the world is going on a forum for a game you poured your heart into, for a game you missed your kids’ bedtimes for, to see how people like it but instead find people calling you incompetent, getting literal death threats, having your work equated to dropping a hydrogen bomb on a developing nation. And for reasons like that, over my 18 year career, I’ve grown to resent the fans. Maybe not resent, but I certainly don’t feel the need to justify my decisions when no matter what you do/say people will be jerks about it. Not everyone is terrible, but there’s a reason people say that a bad apple spoils the bunch. I avoid the internet for about 2 months after a product I work on goes live because I’m just over the abuse. That’s basically all I have to say. Designers are people and people make mistakes. Nobody is sitting in Nottingham twirling their mustache and celebrating how they f-ed over Slaanesh. The reality is some poor soul probably stuck his head out to see what the reception was to the GHB info getting out and feels awful while double checking his tuning algorithm and scrambling to make changes for a FAQ. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

That makes life a lot easier. Thanks!

After a break from the hobby for a couple years, I'm super into the idea of starting a Cities army. I already have some painted Stormcast and KO that I'd like to use as a jumping off point. My question revolves around paint schemes. If my SCE are painted like Hammers of Sigmar, would people cry foul or be annoyed if I played Tempest's Eye, or any other City for that matter? I'm 99% certain it would be "legal" and my gut feeling is it doesn't matter since they wouldn't really have their special rules anyway. However, I don't play enough to have a sense of if that's what people generally think and I'd hate to cash in game time with the wife and kids to just have an annoyed opponent. Thanks.