wayniac

It's funny bc I am having a similar talk in a World of Warcraft discord and the same thing came up about a fan-made rating system; the people who aren't affected as much just see whining and ignore everyone else's complaints, and those are the ones often asked for their thoughts/opinions. So it's self-defeating for the huge amount of normal people.

I honestly think sometimes it's to keep the narrative going that everything is fine and its only the "scrubs" (Sirlin's definition) who are complaining, to avoid discussing the issues. I see that in tons of games, the higher end don't see/know/care about the average people because it doesn't affect them at all so they just see people complaining about stuff. They are so far above the average curve that they can't see what is being said so, rather than try to understand it they just assume it's unfounded. If anything it shows the danger of looking at the higher end for data and listening to what they say. They are out of touch with the "plight of the masses" so anything they say is only in their little bubble. I mean, if they don't see there's a massive faction imbalance in the middle and GW asks them for feedback/playtesting why would they say it's a problem? They wouldn't, because they don't see the problem, so nothing will get fixed.

There was a Warhammer Weekly episode yesterday that discussed this. But what it semeed to show is that if there is a skill gap between players, the faction choice does not matter as much. That is, a better player with a worse faction can beat a worse player with a better faction. Which I agree with, and think we all knew. What I am curious about though is how many top players are playing a C-tier faction against other top tier players and what the actual stats would be then, because it seems to me that with top player with a C-tier faction versus another top tier player with an S-tier faction, the faction choice will come into play as both players are good. What was telling is the "fat middle" because if the top percentile do not see faction mattering as much, they are incapable of seeing the middle where faction DOES matter a lot. Which tells me they are the wrong people to decide what is/isn't balanced since they don't see where it has the most effect.

I think for me one of the biggest frustrations has been for years now I have defended vehemently that if you are not playing against people who are running tournament level lists, and I'm not even talking about the ridiculously broken S tier ones, that you can pretty much pick what appeals to you and have at least a decent chance, barring luck, for a well played game against a similarly chosen list. I have pushed this mindset on people that I have met who are interested in the game and I have strongly believed that it is the case. I just was having a conversation with someone who was against the idea of telling someone to buy what appeals to them and instead push them towards the strong units and armies while ignoring the weaker ones, the idea being that you don't want them to waste their time. I understand that completely, but at the same time I know personally that my first impression of a game, if I was brand new and interested in it and the first thing I was told is not which army or aesthetic appeals to you but avoid these four armies entirely because they're garbage and then ignore all of these units for the army you like and focus on these three because they're good, would have been "why is this a game I want to play". After all who would want to play a game where they are told the army they like, which is constantly pitched as the way you should decide what to play, will result in them auto losing against pretty much anyone playing even a decent army with little to no chance of winning because the company writing the rules isn't interested in balance.

A little, but tbh I have always found their approach with weekly releases and FOMO to be completely the wrong way to approach it. Obviously enough people don't care that it works out well for them but it has always felt like the wrong way to handle releasing models/games.

On the subject of saves it always struck me as odd that someone at GW decided that saves should be applied the way they did instead of like every other game (and how it used to be in Warhammer) where it directly modifies your save not your role. I mean, we had 1+ save stuff in WHFB too (I think it was super ultra rare though like only on characters with specific magic items) and you auto-saved against no modifiers and you had a better chance with modifiers since a -2 would give you a 3+, and so on. Yet someone thought it would be neat to completely throw real math out the window and apply save mods to the die roll rather than the stat.

The real issue is it doesn't even have to be one person tailoring to the meta, it can be someone who really likes Lumineth or Seraphon or whatever the big meta armies are and other people like Nighthaunt, Sylvaneth, Beast of Chaos and whatever the bottom tiers are. The people playing the weak armies are going to lose no matter what against the tough armies, through no fault of their own even before you factor in the meta. That's just terrible all around and is a good way to get people to throw their hands up in frustration when they constantly lose because they like a "weak" army.

I should clarify I specifically mean the majority of games. If you go to a tournament then sure not everything is going to work but that's part of tournaments (it's still a problem IMHO but a localized one). When that's the case in normal, everyday casual games it's a monumental problem because those sorts of players are the ones most likely to get "hoodwinked" by being told they can play what catches their fancy, only to find out that they can't unless they enjoy getting their teeth kicked in game after game because they "chose poorly" by happening to like certain models and/or wanting to build an army around a certain theme. That isn't right and should not be accepted by anyone.

It is not in any way, shape or form acceptable that A) playing X army versus Y army means you immediately lose, or B) That you should have to choose between playing units you like and losing or playing units you don't like if you want to win. The latter especially since GW likes to peddle the narrative that you can, so it's disingenuous at best and straight up false advertising at worse.

Sadly I think this is more common than people think. People don't want to lose because they like X and X happens to be weak or someone else likes Y and Y is OP. The fact that is such a common occurrence shows there are major issues, and it's worse because GW seems to pretend that these things don't happen.

This is largely a GW game problem. 40k suffers from the same in most cases. But I agree completely, the idea of building around a list is usually an anathema to people who play an army for playing an army, not because it's whatever is the best. I have legit talked to people who have said unequivocally that they don't care anything about the lore, or the models, or anything really other than "is this good". They will play an army they have no attraction to, even dislike, if it gives a better chance of winning events. They really don't even care about the game; they only play AOS/40k because it's popular, not because they like anything about it. I cannot fathom that mindset. I think the underlying issue has always been that, for whatever reason, it seems to be a binary choice in Warhammer where you can either have an army that fits the background or has a specific theme and does badly, or throw all that out the window and only play what's good. There are a few outliers of course where you can do both, but they are generally rare. And after 30ish years this problem still has not been realized by GW or, possibly worse, it has been realized and ignored while they speak out of both sides of their mouth and say it's important while making it less important.

Couple of things here: 1) GW games have never been balanced, and usually are some of the most unbalanced games on the market. Its always been hotly debated if it's intentional or just poor work but at this point I have to think it's intentional, especially for AOS, given that the AOS design team is newer and seem to have a more of a competitive bent than the 40k team who always seemed to act like the competitive aspect of the game was a degenerate outlier (the whole "forge the narrative" meme from 6th/7th edition). I cannot believe that the way some battletome's are crazy OP and some are middling is anything short of intentional with how intelligent and "in touch" with the tournament crowd the AOS team seems to be; someone like Ben Johnson doesn't seem like he would write something and not know just how OP it will be. 2) People just don't care enough, either because they don't see it as a problem, they don't encounter it, or whatever reason. 7th edition 40k plummeted to the point where they needed to almost totally redo it for 8th (and IMHO quickly went back down the same path but that's a topic for another place) but AOS has never seemed to have that, at least not to the point where people aren't eating up everything GW puts out irrespective of the quality, or lack thereof, of the rules. So if it's not enough of a problem, there's no incentive to care about it or treat it as something important. 3) There has always seemed to be this random at best attempt to fix things that, more often than not, seems to indicate not understanding the problem in the first place. You see this more in 40k where units really need a stat revamp but instead get some seemingly random point tweaks to make them played more (or, more likely, a nerf/points increase to the units that are played more) that totally misses why they aren't used at all. I am not sure if AOS suffers from the same but I'd imagine it does, which goes back to the whole "is this intentional or not" discussion in my first point because it has to be clear that a unit is bad for other reasons than its points, yet points are what tends to be focused on. 4) There seems to be the idea that a meta is "healthy" if you see half a dozen different factions in them when all of those factions ignore 2/3 of their books to focus on a tiny minority of options that are deemed "competitive" and get pushed as the only way to play unless you want to get your teeth kicked in. This to me shows there is not a healthy meta or health balance because in an idea situation each faction should have multiple "builds" (and I hate using that word in regards to wargames) not a single one that shows up everywhere to give that faction a fighting chance. When you have a few outliers at the top and everything else at the bottom it shows that the outliers are clearly the issue, if the rest are "balanced" being low tier. It's not at all unexpected that a 100% optimized ("cheese") list designed for LVO or SCGT or whatever is considered the "grand championship" of tournaments will crush a non-optimized list, but there seems to be too much of a gulf between things again where picking what you like will just result in you losing most of your games because you were unfortunate enough to like Army X and not Army Y or Units A, B, and C in Army Y and not units K, L, and M which are the "competitive" options. 5) As other people have said, you can't view tournaments in isolation despite that being the best way given how much of an outlier competitive play tends to be with its design compared to anything else, even if using the same Matched Play rules. There are plenty of areas where everything is, in effect, a mini-tournament due to how competitive people are and anything less than your uber-cheese lists will be destroyed, and there are areas where people see the cheese lists and it trickles down to the casual gamers as well. In addition, all it takes is one person to start bringing a super competitive list to a casual game night and things can become an escalating series of killing off everything non-competitive as people see someone playing a casual list be absolutely crushed to the point of having no fun at all by the uber cheese list and soon everyone is scrambling to avoid that by going more competitive. That absolutely happens, and not only that but it skews new people's perspectives because they are told, specifically by GW, that you can and should pick models you like and a faction which appeals to you only to be told that: a) The faction you like is weak because of whatever reason GW deemed it should be and sucks to be you if you really like that faction b) The faction you like is good but the units you like are bad and sucks to be you if the units that are good don't appeal to you If either one of those happen there's a good chance a new player is going to feel "duped" if they buy into the game and lose 90% of their games without even feeling like they have a chance just because they liked a certain faction and/or units and everyone else around them is playing comp lists that will steamroll anything non-comp.

I am not, but a big reason why is because they are so prevalent. They seem to exist as a band-aid fix to having 1+ saves or some other nonsense, which is already poor design in the first place. When MWs were rare it was a lot better but when you can spit out a ton of mortal wounds it becomes silly.

How so? I've seen for years now where most of a book is deemed to be "garbage" because it's not the most OP option, therefore meaning it will never get seen in competitive play except by people who want to try to dark horse things. I've seen this for over 15 years now across Warhammer and most other tabletop games (usually to a lesser extent than Warhammer due to balancing). Half of the options in AOS you're told to skip out on and take whatever the FOTM netlist is if you ask for what works and what doesn't.

You say this as though nearly every army doesn't suffer from the same thing in competitive play. It may not be as detrimental with some compared to others but every army only the gimmicks are worth considering when you decide to focus on competitive above all else. It's been the major problem with competitive play forever: 80% of your options are garbage and may as well not even exist because it's not the cheesy/gimmicky choice. It's the price you pay for breaking everything down to numbers.

Bit of column A, bit of column B Right now I think the best thing is to pick an army that can reasonably do both, rather than an army that is "low tier" which would have a hard time doing well. That way I can tailor up or down. Right now that is Idoneth Deepkin (and I like the eel models anyway so I'm covered there). This is something I see a lot. People just buy their "2k list" and then only play that. They have no other models except the exact models in that 2k list, and often won't even play other than 2000 points because they only bought very specific models to fit that competitive list, so they'd be at a big disadvantage at anything else because whatever wombo-combo they specifically bought only works at 2k. So you have not only a subset of players that only buy the minimum needed but also buy an extremely specific minimum and refuse to do anything where they can't use that very specific minimum, because they don't know anything else.

This bears repeating because like I stated previously I've witnessed exactly this happen and it pretty much killed anything other than competitive play in that area because nobody wanted to play a "handicapped" list or, worse, feel they were just going to get clubbed by taking a fluffy list against someone else. Granted, that can be solved by a discussion with your opponent but that's not always as frequent as it should be.

Oh this I know. In my years I've seen this happen to a previously laid back and casual group. One person started bringing a power list and over time casual play essentially became extinct as more and more people got tired of being crushed by the power lists and brought power lists of their own. It was pretty much mutually assured destruction but in a gaming context. Now admittedly when I tell this story it never paints the competitive aspect in a positive light, but sadly I think this is the inevitable result of anything outside of maybe a very small and close-knit group. Anything involving pick up games at a store or club will inevitably go this route in some capacity because there will always be someone who, knowingly or not, decides to play a FOTM list or army and all it usually takes is curbstomping someone in full view of everybody else to get the escalation war going. It sounds like overall my best approach is going to be to choose an army that's higher tier but then have a varied collection so, for instance, I can bring out the big guns against someone who wants to play competitively or who I know plays competitive lists while swapping some of those powerful choices out for less powerful ones against the people playing more casually to not become TFG. Thankfully though I think Deepkin fit that perfectly.

So would I be right in assuming that if AOS wasn't popular but another game was and had a large competitive community you would play that game? That is, you play a game that offers you a large pool of competitive players without any vested interest in that game?

I get that part, but I don't get playing an army you don't like the models/whatever just because its better.

See, this is what I struggle so hard to get. Like.. you would pick an army with models you don't care for, with even the most basic fluff blurb about who they are not being appealing, just because it's the "best" army? The "churn and burn" approach where you aren't invested in your army beyond how it currently performs just.. seems so foreign.

I think I'm attracted to Idoneth Deepkin, which honestly from what I see seem to be able to go more competitive or not depending on what you take (i.e. how many eels). So I might be able to swing both if I get lucky... although there's still the issue of not really being able to do a roundede army, but that's been the case for years.

I mean they aren't mutually exclusive at the high level, but I wish I could not care about the lore/reality. I mean if you ignore that, then what keeps you to an army? Wouldn't you just swap armies to whatever is the "best" at a given time, if the army background/aesthetics are meaningless?

If this is the case though, they don't show it. Their armies in white dwarf (and yes I know its a marketing publication at its core) show a variety of units, not spamming the 3 units that have been deemed "good". This is part of the dilemma. That shouldn't be the case. The reality is that it is, but it's the hardest thing to adopt that and not care about the rest. You're making very valid points, you really are. Just... it's such a hard mindset to get into. Especially when not only part of books but entire armies are deemed "not worth taking" because they aren't competitive. It can't be "S tier or bust"

Whether or not this is a good thing though is subjective. Personally I feel that "tSports" are a terrible idea that ****** all over the foundation of the genre (but I also feel the same about esports). But you are right, this mindset is becoming more and more prevalent and is a huge part of why I keep feeling the draw of that style of gameplay, knowing how much it removes choices and reduces 25 options to 5 because those 5 have been decided to be "the best". It just feels completely wrong sometimes. I mean, the competitive mindset literally looks at a brand new book and throws out 90% of it instantly and then encourages everyone else to ignore that 90% too since it's "not good". You basically hit the exact nail on the head. You can't do both in AOS, and I don't know which one I want to focus on because I see the benefit of both, but one side (the competitive one) makes me feel so many times that I'd just be doing something boring. Not because I dislike the aspect, but because let's say I pick whatever FOTM new hotness army is dominating (OBR, let's say). Well there are a few other people in the area who have that army too. These games then become boring mirror matches that may as well be pseudo-tournament rounds because there isn't going to be any sort of logical story to it, it's literally just like matchmaking in an online game where you don't care about the lore or background of your character, you picked it because it's the best one currently. That shouldn't be something that I care about (what everyone else plays), but the problem is I DO.