wayniac

I think the irony here is that you possibly would see the lesser seen battalions more if they didn't cost points. But they have to cost points or people would say it's not fair. While I'm personally not a fan of removing them completely because it does remove a lot of flavor if they're not going to balance them and they're not going to limit them let's say one per army, And they are going to keep tying it to drops which determines who goes first then I don't see any other way Short of getting rid of them for matched play.

As good as that is to know,that raises even more concern for why we keep seeing them sneak in. It's usually been considered the crazy imbalance is either intentionally put there to allow for "mastery" or it's lack of design skill/knowledge and they keep being missed. I imagine it's a combination of things (hard to test all the combos when you need to get it out the door) but still the fact it keeps happening after years and years....

Exactly. They technically already did, since there's Hallowheart and Moon Base something or other for 40k which seem to be that size. So it's definitely a good thing IMHO even if people will say its a minimum but nobody will treat it as that.

I am mainly curious if he is bringing a new army, or if he's just going to be like a special character.

So I got to thinking, and 9th edition 40k changed the board sizes to be smaller. I noticed that A) the Shattered Dominion board is no longer available and B) the Hallowheart or whatever it's called board, the one that's several pieces of thick card, is roughly the same size as the new 40k board size. Could that mean that AOS will get a reduced board size too? Considering that would make melee better, maybe that's the counter to the fear of charge reactions making shooting even better? *I know the size is a "minimum" but in 40k at least it quickly became the default once all the major tournaments said they would adopt the new size as the baseline. So I'd expect the same thing to happen in AOS and the "minimum" to become the only way.

Absolutely spot on. The other big things in historical gaming you don't hear whining and complaining about the armies having different objectives because that somehow not fair. Both armies having different objectives means you don't need to have balanced forces because your win condition is different. Yet in Warhammer people expect everything to be almost identical or as close as possible or it somehow cannot be balanced and cannot be enjoyable. Which is more funny when you think of the fact that points are not at all balanced they just give the illusion of balance and the point of list building as a skill is to make your 2000 points behave like 3,000 in which case you're not being balanced anyway.

Definitely both, with more on the latter since they could be more balanced and it would help everyone. But I also think the former is to blame a lot by pushing this as the only way, how you can't possibly have fun if you aren't trying to do everything possible to win and giving advice like "Drop 75% of what you have, buy these units that the community has deemed good and spam it" with no regard for what the person they are giving advice to wants, not to mention the ignoring or outright demonizing of styles other than Matched Play. I'd put a lot more blame on the designers but the community keeps perpetuating it as well.

Yes for the most part, but I think the tournament crowd has pushed the idea of balance, which is a good thing. However it also encourages/defends skew lists, spam and 90% of a book being considered garbage to the point where new players get told to avoid armies completely, ignore all of what they want or throw away 75% of their list and replace it instead of being told how to make the most of what they have. So it's sort of a double-edged sword. I think if it was obvious the game was not competitive and people didn't try to force it into that mold, the game would be more enjoyable for everyone, but the fact people want it competitive means they also push for balance.

Support does not mean designed for. The game has been turned into a competitive game, sure (mainly by people who then pressured the company to accept it), but it has never been designed with that as the goal, it's more a side effect because so many people can't seem to play a game if it doesn't have competitive/tournament play baked in.

Amen. But since people try to turn ("twist") the game into a tournament game, it does skew everything else and has a trickle down effect. And since it seems like those are the people who have GW's ear, it seems more and more like they are wanting to keep things broken so they can have their busted "competitive" combos.

It would be fine if it wasn't for The scale creep they keep doing. That's going to be the real problem.

I have long suspected part of the issue might be that the people GW are looking to for advice/suggestions/data either cannot see the problem at all (which seems to be the case from the Warhammer Weekly video) or at worst are actively trying to keep the game imbalanced so they can feel like they can "solve" it by finding the busted combos. There is a pervasive trend in some competitive games that people feel like they've "won" the game by discovering things that give them an advantage. Naturally that's hearsay and almost a conspiracy theory so I don't totally believe it, but the fact things seem to never at all get better or, often even acknowledge the correct problems has given me pause more than a few times in the past when considering if a lot of this is willful neglect or not being able to see the forest through the trees. Judging by how some competitive gamers want to treat games I would not be surprised if a lot of it was intentional to give the impression that finding these busted combos and using them to win is "mastering" the game and a good thing.

Not always. It has been proven time and time again that what happens at the top tables will trickle down to the lower tables, and eventually to the casual ones as well. People see X army is winning, and will play that army. They hear "all these units suck, only these three are good and you should spam them" and they do it. In a casual environment all it takes is one guy showing up to the game night with some top tier netlist and crushing someone playing a casual list, and the entire scene can be turned on its head nearly overnight to nothing but comp netlists as people scramble to play "good" armies so its not them getting curbstomped (this is not a joke I have literally seen this happen several times over the years). It's not just a top table problem, it can and does affect the entire game due to the monkey see, monkey do attitude that comes from trying to make games competitive.

This seems crazy even for GW. Now double turn gone I could see and love. 40k's crusade I would love. I do not see them invalidating all the warscrolls. That would mean an 8th edition style index? Also this directly contradicts the previous rumors so... sorry friend, I don't buy it.

I would rather see it exist as a suggested rule for organized play. You still may get the people who think anything in organized play is automatically part of the game but I think a lot more people would say okay we're not using this for regular games if The default was off rather than on. It has been proven time and time again it is incredibly difficult to get people to agree to remove existing rules as a house rule while it seems easier to say okay sure will use this optional rule. Basically people are a lot more willing to agree to use an optional rule than agree to not use a base rule. So if they did that you could ignore it in normal games still have it for tournaments and use it when you feel the need to practice.

On the topic of the supposed 3.0 leaks I'm a little disappointed to see it looks like the double turn is staying. I personally don't mind as much but I've talked to so many people that say the #1 reason they avoid playing AOS is because of the "unfun double turn mechanic". That alone tells me it's problematic.

How on earth can you think they do that when even the good armies tend to have only one single way to play if you want them to be good? Does that not clearly indicate an issue?

And, to make it worse, with GW's backwards logic they will see this and say "Sylvaneth are not selling, we should ignore them" rather than "Sylvaneth are not selling, why and how can we fix it". So in effect what they are doing is making some armies not sell, which means they will focus on the armies which do sell, leaving the armies which don't sell in even worse states because they think in reverse. I don't think anyone wants every list to be viable against anything. A list should have strengths and weaknesses. But you should absolutely be able to: A) Pick a faction you like the look/background/anything about and not lose (or be at a significant disadvantage) just for liking that faction above another one B) Not be stuck with a single "good" build in that faction with everything else being low tier to where, even if the faction is considered good not playing that one build results in the same thing as if you had picked an underpowered faction. However the problem seems to be either through sheer incompetence or, more likely, deliberately trying to imitate how CCGs work the design team is incapable of doing both of those and, in the rare event they manage to do it, it lasts only as long as they decide to change how they design armies midway through an edition at which point most things before that fall out of favor due to not adapting to the paradigm shift. As long as people keep putting up with it, it will continue to happen.

IKR. Gardus Steel-Soul? More like Garbage Steel-Soul amirite? lol

A lot of those sound pretty good to me. I would bet that if they remove battalions each battle tome will add some back. It will be interesting to see if they actually fix the problems or if they continue to show that they are not aware of them

I mean to me it's basically this, I can' draw a graph or anything though. I would think that: A) If two players are of roughly equivalent skill level* the faction power can be the deciding factor That is, you will rarely see a player using a C-tier army defeat a similarly skilled player using an S-tier army. NOTE: It's not impossible just rare. B) If two players are of different skill levels, for example a more skilled player facing a lesser skilled player, the faction power is less important. It still is going to be a factor, because that imbalance does not go away, but not nearly as much given one player is more skilled than the other. It is not as bad as some previous editions of 40k where, for example, you could see a newbie with a "busted" army defeat an advanced player using a "weak" army. *E.g. both highly skilled, both average, etc. Now in the WHW video the impression I got was that the top percentile, that is the more skilled players, seems to show the opposite of #1, in that the faction does NOT really factor in as much as it appeared at first. Which if true is fine, but the "fat middle" as it's called among most players the faction can have major effects on the game. This is the area that seems to be downplayed due to the top not seeing faction being the main factor in games, ergo the top players (who are often the ones that feel they should decide the game's direction) aren't even seeing the problem that the majority (that fat middle) are seeing. Therefore my concern is that, if we trust the game's direction to that upper percentile, how are they going to fix the issues perceived in the middle when they aren't seeing those issues as major? The issue doesn't simply go away because the top 10% or whatever don't see it as impactful.

Without flattening out faction power then how would you achieve this? We have already seen where somebody who likes for example beasts of chaos will get steamrolled by somebody playing seraphon due to that faction imbalance except maybe if they are the top percentile of player. If some factions are clearly stronger than others they should be toned down to an acceptable level for the majority of people not just for the high level. Again, the problem seems to be that the middle where most of the imbalance happens is being downplayed by the results at the top.

Because it's very obvious from the video that the math is skewed to show that narrative

I think it is rather disingenuous to assume that faction is not a major factor. Nobody cares about the top tournament results because those players are not in the normal curve and on top of that most if not all of them are never going to take a low tier army to an event they are going to take the army that performs the best to give them the best chance of winning. The results from the top tournaments do nothing but skew the data and push the narrative that faction balance is a lot closer than it really is. Which goes back to the point that those people are not the people you want testing the direction of the game because while their skill is there they are oblivious to the actual problems under them.

Most things seem to indicate the opposite. I highly doubt even the most skilled player could take a low tier army to an event with other equally skilled players and do well, if those other players were playing high tier armies. If anything it seems like the cries of imbalance are being downplayed and reduced in how problematic they are to make it seem like less of a problem.