yukishiro1

You're responding to an exchange about a guy who actually did play a game, and was posting his impressions of it. Nobody is saying that anything different is "predetermined" to be unfun. He was saying that having a unit that can't function because of the new coherency changes is not fun, it ends up being a lot of fiddling for no real gain, when they could have just done what most other game systems do instead and adopted cloud coherency, which fixes the issue of daisy chaining without requiring so much fiddling movement and without gimping larger base size models for no clear reason. Please give people the credit they deserve by actually reading what they write before telling them they're not acting in good faith. His post was the definition of a good faith effort at trying the new rules. "The game survives" really isn't the standard we should be judging a change on, IMO, especially when there were obvious alternatives to accomplish the same goal without gimping a bunch of units in the process for no apparent reason anybody can come up with.

He's saying he's a playtester who has been testing AOS 3.0 for 18 months now. Which probably explains the level of personal investment someone would have to have to accuse people of being "ungrateful" for having a negative opinion of the points values. FWIW, the basic message of "try before you write it off" is valid enough. I just wish GW would learn a little bit about communication, and realize that a lot of the negativity around the rules they release - whether points or otherwise - is rooted in not explaining their reasoning for doing various things, and therefore in confusion when the customer is presented with something that seems to make little sense, and no explanation as to why it was done.

But that's not really a satisfying answer, is it? "Just don't do that, it's supposed to be bad now for reasons nobody knows, do something else?" That's rather making his point for him re: the coherency changes not promoting fun gameplay...

I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you, just pointing out that there's no reason except GW's release model that people should have to live with having their factions made terrible (or overpowered) by a new edition's rules for what is literally years in many cases. It's a problem GW creates itself because they want to make more money by staggering release - and there's nothing illegal about that, to be clear. But the resulting imbalance is on them, it's a choice they make by the way they release stuff. It's not some unavoidable rule of the universe.

I think it is super clear that GW either doesn't appreciate the consequences or doesn't really care about the impact of base size. They still to this day don't have an actual basing chart in 40k, instead just telling people to use whatever base the model came with...even though base changes over time mean you end up with some units with no less than three or more possible base sizes, all of which have quite significant and different impacts on the unit's strength. And now they've gone and released AOS 3.0, where base size has the greatest impact of any rules set they've ever released, without making any sort of statement about it to show they're even aware of the issue, and with points that don't seem to take the degree to which base size matters even more than it did before into account.

Well, I mean, it's only a natural and unavoidable result of the model GW uses, where it releases the new rules that overpower or gimp certain factions, without releasing rules updates to address what they've done at the same time, instead preferring to make some factions wait literally years to be brought into the new edition...on a model where editions last only 3 years. Meaning some factions will spend less time with the "intended" version of their rules than the "unintended" version.

I wasn't trying to be aggressive at all; I apologize if you mistook me using the exact same phrasing you used as aggression, it was intended to be a tongue-in-cheek commentary on how starting posts with "why do people keep doing/saying X?" is an annoying and condescending way to argue - especially when that's not even an accurate representation of what they actually said anyway. If you found it annoying and condescending, perhaps there is a lesson to be learned there? No, that isn't my position, and I think you know it isn't my position. My "position" is what I stated, that everyone is well aware of the ways to mitigate the issues with 3.0 coherency, so no, we are not in need of your enlightenment on the subject and no, our feelings on coherency are not based upon ignorance. If you would like to discuss the actual rules, rather than other posters' supposed lack of knowledge, I am more than happy to do so. The point of these forums is to discuss AOS, not one another.

Why do you keep misrepresenting what people say? Everyone is well aware that you can adopt gamey formations (calling that two ranks is a bit silly when the whole reason it works is precisely that the ranks are staggered, not actual ranks) that can mitigate the problems with the new coherency system in some circumstances. Please refrain from beating on straw men.

Yeah, the coherency change is bizarre. Taking 40k's already restrictive coherency, then doubling the restrictiveness, and then on top of THAT not adding in the ability for the second rank to strike if the first rank is close to the enemy is like a triple whammy that just feels totally unnecessary. The result is a lot of geometry in order to make 32mm base 1" range infantry terrible...why, exactly?

Yeah, it's very annoying re: keeping a coherent collection. On the other hand, I will say...just a little bit of scale creep makes a tremendous difference in how easy it is to paint things to a better standard. My custodes are by far my best-painted army (and there's no gold anywhere on them), and the reason for that is 100% that the larger scale allows someone of my quite limited ability a much easier canvas to work with. Details are actually possible to pick out, volumes are large enough to highlight and shade effectively without extremely fine brush control, etc etc. I didn't realize how massive a difference it was until I went straight from painting Harlequins - tiny little stick figures - to Custodes, which are probably three times the mass. It's like I suddenly became twice as good of a painter, overnight.

To provide a different professional perspective, a large component of my work is basically proofreading technical work. And as anyone who does similar work will tell you, it's all about process, not individuals. When a major mistake makes it into print, that's not an individual error, it's a collective error, because it should never be only one person making changes that aren't checked and double-checked and triple-checked by other people who weren't directly involved in writing it in the first place, because you can't proofread your own work, that's a basic rule. I can tell you with some confidence that GW either does not employ editors who understand the substance of what they are proofreading, or they ignore the feedback those editors give. Something like the 240 points per model Nundams wouldn't make it through even non-professional proofreading by a third party who understands the game. The only way something like that makes it into print is if they're sending stuff off to the printers without proofing it competently. Ditto for the 10 point Reavers. These aren't even developer mistakes BTW, it's not like the developers intended for the Nundams to be 240 points per model and immune to damage 1 weapons, those are just language errors that nobody spotted, and the only way nobody spots things that blatant is if your processes are inadequate. For something like that to make its way into print once is a failure. To have it happen multiple times within a period of a few months shows something is seriously wonky with the way they proof their documents. To the point that it costs money to put up a day-1 FAQ to change just one value...yes, but that's why you shouldn't foul it up in the first place. The fact that GW doesn't feel embarrassed enough about serious errors to fix them immediately is also why said errors keep making it into print in the first place. A culture that placed more value on getting it right in the first place is also a culture that would place enough value on correcting the error immediately to pay the people involved a couple hours of overtime if necessary to get said FAQ out, or, at a minimum, to maintain some sort of "known issues" list that can let people know they're aware of the error and working on fixing it. Now those are typographical errors, not balance errors. But from what we know of GW's playtesting program, it's every bit as basic as its editing. A company worth billions should be able to do better. It's not a failure of individual developers, it's a failure to put into place the sort of processes that we should expect for a company that claims to deliver premium products at a premium price. There'd probably be less developers feeling sad looking at the negative feedback towards their work if GW invested in making sure that work gets checked better before it goes out the door in the first place, and especially if they invested more in communicating how their processes work and in enlisting the help of the community in improving them.

You initially said the points appeared in a white dwarf immediately afterward - hence my comment that it couldn't possibly have been in response to what you did, because of the timeline for publishing those things. That warhammer community post is really interesting to see - I didn't play AOS back then, but that seems like exactly the sort of community engagement I'm talking about (though even then, if the points changes were prompted by community feedback, why not admit that?). Why do you think they stopped doing that? "Here's some changes we're thinking about, test them out, let us know what you think" is exactly what they need to be doing regularly to cultivate a better relationship. Was it just because AOS was still in its infancy at that stage? Because it's not an approach they've taken in 40k either, the game I have deeper roots in. On the one hand, I'm encouraged to see that the AOS devs were at one time more transparent than is usual for GW to be...on the other hand, it's frustrating to see they they've moved away from that sort of approach again in recent years. I think if they had kept that up, they'd be in a much healthier place re: engaging with the community.

I think that's a deeply unfair and inaccurate summary. To take your HoS example, on this very forum you've seen people spending a lot of time and energy on sussing out the feeling of the community and coming up with proposed solutions. I think it would have been hard for you to choose a more inapplicable example to try to illustrate your point about people simply being whiners. As for the claim that you got the Fyreslayers points changed by sending in an email and then in the very next white dwarf they fixed the points for you...(1) that's not how publications work, those are planned out far in advance, the fact that it happened in the next white dwarf itself means it couldn't have been responding to you, it was just a coincidence, and (2) don't you think if they really changed the points because of you, they would have told you that? I mean, wouldn't that have been the decent thing to do if they really did make changes based on all that hard work and effort you put in - to at least acknowledge that it was your work that changed their mind? This goes back to communication and owning up to mistakes again: if GW is listening, they sure aren't telling people they're listening. "You email us your solutions to fix our game for us, maybe we'll take them, maybe we won't, but we certainly won't deign to tell you if you do, and there's no way we'll ever admit we made a mistake in the first place" is exactly the sort of thing that puts peoples' noses out of joint and causes them to just yell into the void. A constructive relationship is a two-way street. GW unfortunately has not historically shown any real desire to engage in the sort of bidirectional communication necessary to cultivate a productive collaborative relationship with the fans. Not even with their own hand-picked playtesters, ironically - when you listen to playtesters talk about their experience, one of the fascinating things is that the communication is still unidirectional there - they just get sent rules, they play with them, they send back their feedback...and that's it. There's no direct communication, there's no direct back-and-forth. It's still message in a bottle stuff. The GW development team might as well be up on a cloud somewhere. Contrast this with something like the approach CA takes to running Total War: Warhammer, and it's quite stark. CA has its issues as a company too, but one thing they are much better at doing is fostering a dialogue with the community, especially when it comes to balance issues. The CA Devs responsible for balancing their Warhammer game are constantly engaged in dialogue with the community. They may not always do what people want, but there's not the sense that they're God up on a cloud, or a black box you're never, ever allowed a glimpse inside.

This is why past practice is so important. If GW was in the habit of owning up to mistakes and correcting errors in its publications in a timely fashion, people might give them the benefit of the doubt, even without GW posting a "we know there's issues guys, don't worry, they'll be fixed in a day-1 FAQ." But that would be totally out of character. It took them a month to fix the points costs for Reavers, something that literally only required changing a 1 to a 2 in one place in the document. And again, even when they did it, there was no acknowledgment they had messed up, and it was presented as a "check out these exciting changes we made because we love you so much!" not "our bad guys, this was a really embarrassing error and we'll do our best not to repeat it." And then the same thing happens with the very next book...which they didn't fix with a day-1 FAQ either. GW hasn't earned the right for people to give it the benefit of the doubt. So that's why communication is doubly important. If there is a big day-1 FAQ coming for AOS 3.0, they should be trumpeting that from the rooftops, not maintaining complete radio silence. As relates to AOS points...we literally had them drop the ball last time and tell us there would be no changes at all, because <reasons>, and to wait another 6 months. And now we wait...and we get something that's very hard to make any sort of sense of in many places, with no explanation for the bits that seem to make no sense. It's no surprise people are feeling confused and annoyed, and there's only so many times you can tell someone "just have faith, this time it'll be different" before they stop believing it.

It's not even about communication so much as about an attitude of owning and admitting your errors. GW never, ever does this. No matter how badly it screws something up, any fix is presented as an improvement we should all be grateful for GW bestowing on us in their benevolence, rather than as an error that GW had a responsibility to correct. If GW had cultivated a reputation for owning its mistakes, people would interact with the company in a very different way than they do. The reason people get so exasperated is because they see GW doing the same thing over and over and over again. The books ( (40k more than AOS, to be fair) are filled with typos and mistakes caused by a lack of sufficient proofreading, and we never get any acknowledgement that that isn't acceptable. The points for new editions are usually like throwing darts at a board blindfolded, but we never get a statement from GW that it recognizes how it's not very good at doing this. Etc etc. If you had a co-worker that behaved the way GW did, they'd have you tearing your hair out. Not so much from the errors themselves, as from the not admitting they'd done anything wrong, and then acting like they'd done you some big favor by correcting their own mistakes.

So here's the thing: the reason so much of feedback to GW is negative and not polite is that the company makes no real recognition that it listens to any of it. People shout into a void because, well, they're shouting into a void. Nobody shouts into a void politely, because they don't know that someone is even on the other end listening. People are polite to other people, not to faceless corporate behemoths. If GW had better lines to communication to the players, a release like this wouldn't happen in the first place - not without the sort of caveat I mentioned a few posts ago, admitting that the points are a big work in process and likely to be seriously flawed in places, and soliciting constructive feedback. And if that was what they did, I guarantee you the response would be way more constructive. But that isn't how GW operates. For whatever reason, humility and recognition of errors is not something GW does naturally. Even when correcting explicit, unambiguous mistakes, you'll notice they almost never actually admit any sort of fault. The only time I can remember them doing it is with Iron Hands, and even then it was a passive-aggressive sort of "well we knew they were overpowered but thought it was better to wait to see just how much before making changes" kind of admission. I mean look at the recent Sisters book. They released a book with units that were supposed to be 80 points each and reduce incoming damage by 1 point to a minimum of 1...as 240 point per model units that reduce damage by 1 with no minimum, meaning they're immune to damage 1 weapons. When it became obvious what they had done, did they immediately fix it with a FAQ? No. Did they even acknowledge the issue with a post somewhere to let people know they were aware and that it wasn't intentional? No. Instead: radio silence. Nothing. Nada. It will be fixed in the new FAQ with no sort of admission of fault, just like 10 point Reavers in the DE Book - another typo - were fixed without any sort of admission of fault. GW actively creates negativity in its relationship with its fans with the attitude it takes towards interacting with us.

I would just like to take a moment here to complain about people who are complaining about complainers who complain about complaining. Thank you.

I think one thing that would go a long way is if GW was a little humbler and more transparent about its processes. If these points came with a page-long disclaimer at the start saying: "Folks, we try our best, but we acknowledge that we just don't have the internal processes set up to do initial points values correctly. These are provisional values, they'll probably be seriously off in places. Please send us feedback, and we'll make monthly tweaks until we get them into a good place" I think the reaction would be totally different. Instead, we get puff pieces on warhammer community, followed by complete radio silence about problems. And then a points tweak comes out in December or January to great fanfare, correcting things everybody spotted 6 months before, without the slightest acknowledgement that they were wrong to begin with. This breeds resentment among the player base, because we see a company that evidently is both (1) unable to do this stuff correctly on its own without community data, but also (2) completely unwilling to admit that fact.

GW's playtesting programs are unfortunately not very serious, as ex-playtesters occasionally attest to. They often don't even include the point values in the rules they send to the playtesters (or at least some of the playtesters) to test - this happened with 9th edition, for example. The whole thing is more of a program to keep influencers on side than a serious testing system, as evidenced by the constant errors (i.e. 10 point Reavers in the DE book, 240 points a model nundams that ignore damage 1 in the new SoB book, etc) that make it into the final books, even quite aside from balance problems.

The sting for everybody is that these points just don't make sense, as we can all tell from taking a quick look at them. This isn't some masterful plan we just can't see the logic of. It's largely scattershot nonsense. Just like the 9th edition initial points were scattershot nonsense. It's not like those turned out to be a masterful galaxy brain plan nobody could see the wisdom of, either. GW is just really bad at setting initial points for a new edition. I think at this point it is safe to say that GW has little competitive understanding of its own games, and relies heavily on the players to find the correct points values because it is incapable of doing so itself. Seeing things like Slaangors go up by as much as Sentinels really brings this home.

No, shooting is done model by model within the unit. You have to check range for each one. One thing that is slightly confusing is the wording on having to measure to the closest model, but also that models with minimum ranged characteristics can fire unless the entire target unit is within the minimum distance. These two bits seem to contradict one another - if your catapult has a min 6" range and the enemy unit's closest model is 4" away but the furthest is 12", can you shoot because some models are outside 6", or can you not shoot because you have to measure to the closest visible model, and that one is within the minimum range? I think they are trying to say you can fire in those circumstances, but it's not clearly worded.

Yeah that will be FAQ'd for sure, it was written before AOS moved to the clear definitions of what a normal move is vs a retreat. The whole point of the ability is to let the ships get away from people, even when in melee.

Slaanesh points still feel like a weird sort of gaslighting experiment to see if 1984 can be replicated in the real world. "Yes, we are now at war with Eastasia, and Slaangors are properly pointed at 150 points for 3." Looks like the same people who did the initial points for 40k 9th edition did the points for AOS 3.0 too.

Honestly don't understand what GW is thinking letting you take more than one Loreseeker. It's a deeply problematic unit even at a max of one without any artefacts. Being able to spam them and put artefacts on them is just...wow. A real "you didn't like this thing before? Well, hold our beer" kind of moment.

Loreseeker isn't unique any more. 😄