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hobgoblinclub

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hobgoblinclub last won the day on November 24 2016

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  • Birthday 08/29/1979

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  1. They're a massive company. Suggesting they don't know their market or their own game is getting a bit silly. Regardless, it doesn't take any research to write a broken rule. I could do it right now. Any of us could. Absolutely this. They release rules like this because it sells loads of minis and always has. It isn't going to change because they don't want it too. A minority of us grumble in the dark corners of the internet, like this one, but most people (including us!) still buy their minis. They're the biggest mini company because most people buy their minis. They're not going to look to change that in a hurry. When the nerfs inevitably come to an army, and people dump them en masse on eBay, those are all the people who wouldn't have been buying in the first place without the broken rules. 🤷🏼‍♂️
  2. I don't think they can fully predict the impact of new rules /armies. That's fair enough. It's a complicated game, mistakes are going to happen. But it's not funny rules interactions that we see. It's, regularly, units which are clearly spectacularly powerful based purely on their own warscrolls, or allegiance abilities which are op on their own. Yes, we'll see some unpredictable corner cases. That isn't the complaint. As I've said, there are very often rules which are clearly incredibly powerful from the moment we see them.
  3. True to a certain extent. But, as we've pointed out on this thread, there are a great, great many examples where it's blatantly obvious that something is op even before release. Very often, the community is screaming at a preview article, or screaming on the release of the book, or screaming when the army hits the tournament scene, and GW do nothing. Skyfires got nerfed after shooting everything to pieces for eighteen months and the whole community being aware of how stupidly powerful they were. Why did GW wait so long before reacting? I can only assume because they were selling truck loads of them. Again, this isn't me accusing them of Machiavellian practices or them doing anything underhand. It's good business sense. To the counter argument seems almost silly, doesn't it? 'Don't alter rules to boost sales' would be a pretty reckless company philosophy. The counter argument might say, 'they're not trying to boost sales of individual armies in the short term because the long term health/balance of the game matters more'. And I completely agree that should be true. However, it's patently obvious that that's not the trajectory we're on. The most interesting question, which we're moving away from again (into snarky comments about semantics) is whether or not this is deliberate. All of these are true statements: Individual armies see spikes in power (whether new or not). The meta shifts dramatically. Power seems to be cyclical. If the above weren't true, this discussion would not happen. The discussion should be about intent. And to state that it's not deliberate is surely deeply insulting to GW, designers and all?
  4. I don't think we are. Maybe one or two people on here are. But arguing that the meta manipulation is deliberate isn't to say they're malicious. I'm pretty convinced what we're seeing is absolutely deliberate but I also think it's viable and, clearly successful business model, although that's not to say I like it. I think, part of the reason is difficult to pin down their intentions, is because there's almost certainly conflicting intentions within GW itself. The designers are, most likely, aiming for balance but there's also pressure to achieve sales and they have to factor that in too. If new armies were sold purely on aesthetic, it'd negatively impact sales. Aesthetic sales + new filth sales = more than just aesthetic sales. That's undeniable.
  5. This. Let's not get drawn into the playtest argument again. It's a company philosophy argument not a playtest one. They've literally said many times that they have nothing to do with these decisions. Again, it's not the playtesters. This is a different discussion. They don't decide what to release how how to release it.
  6. This reads like an effort to shut down a reasonable argument. @Greybeard86 has put forward some real balance and supported pretty much everything with evidence. Comparing his points to conspiracy feels like a low blow. It definitely is an interesting discussion! It's the first time I've been drawn back into this forum for about a year! 😁
  7. I feel like KO are actually an extreme example. Because they play in a new design space, GW actually made some mistakes here. They were clearly intended to be filth (see the ridiculous amount of rend and multi-damage). However, GW actually made them op, because it was such a new style of army and they weren't sure how things would interact (much like Ogres in 6th Edition). KO could be used to argue both ways. I don't remember the introduction of the horde discount making too much difference to the power level of any old units. The Nighthaunt book definitely boost LoN though, which, you're right, did seem like an accidental symptom of the release. I think there are many players already exhausted as it is. A battletome shouldn't need it. Or at least every battletome shouldn't need it so extensively. And battletomes should never need it with rules the entire community can see are broken as early as the previews. Nighthaunt were pretty good on release (although not fantastic they certainly sold some Stalkers). Sylvaneth, Wartribes, Mawtribes, BoC, Khorne, and Cities all weren't selling any new minis. Legions were the absolute filth on release. Look at the hit rate for books selling new minis hitting the top of the meta. That could be revealing? Tzeentch, KO, Daughters, Deepkin, Slaanesh, Bonereapers. You do put forward some interesting arguments though. I'm pretty convinced it's deliberate but there are probably some accidental outliers (Stalkers, for example). I've not been on this forum for a while. Is there an easy way to split a quote rather than requoting and deleting bits? I can't remember...
  8. I think, if it was accidental, you'd see more units that already exist bubble up in terms of power. If it was weird rules interactions, new rules would cause spikes in power for old units they'd overlooked. If it was accidental, it'd occur less frequently with new units. Anyone with a grasp of the game can see broken units in a new book before they even play a game. If it was really unintentional, GW would sort massive issues out way quicker. There's been times when the community has been screaming for something to be nerfed but GW have waited for two or three FAQs (until the sales spike is over?). If it was accidental, the meta wouldn't be dominated so perfectly by the books from the last six months at any point in the game's history. Each set of new books gazumps the last with uncanny frequency.
  9. You don't really need the data on realms etc. The data is always skewed regardless of what additional rules are bolted on. The results that the Honest Wargamer cover a far greater data set, yet they demonstrate a very similar picture. And to answer your first question, you know what needs nerfing because it's new. No, seriously. It's not an accident that the new stuff is broken. Yes, there's the occasional book which is pretty balanced from the start (Beasts of Chaos) but a default ban until each book has hit a big FAQ would sort out many of the issues with the tournament scene / arms race. And I'm with you on the article. It was so uninteresting that I only skimmed through the second half.
  10. Absolutely. I've thought about tournaments just banning armies that are less that six months old? Maybe even just leaving them home on club nights until they've had time to get their official, inevitable nerf? Yeah, you might be right. I'd hoped, perhaps naively, that a transparent meta would mean GW having to reign things in a bit. However, the 'broken new hotness' plan seems to sell so well, maybe they've just decided to come clean and show people what to buy if they want to win?
  11. This. It's pretty unreasonable to expect people to spend hundreds on an army and a book, only for the rules to change. Not only that, they change within two weeks of release and then continue changing for months / years. I bought Tzeentch in January 2017 and I thought I was the new greatest player on the scene. Turns out it was just the army was nuts (yes I'm salty as hell 😅). I went through eighteen months of nerfs (most of which were actually needed) only to be left with a book that wasn't even worth opening and an army that played completely differently from when I bought it. I even started buying and painting the Tzeentch minis I didn't like, just to stay in the meta. I'd already given up on tournaments (for now at least) before Covid arrived. I'm planning on playing an army for years (Nurgle) but I'm planning on staying away from the meta altogether so I don't get soured by the wild swings in power.
  12. Ha! I wasn't aiming at you, sorry. 😄 I was just spouting. I think any direct comparison to another game, videogame or tabletop, is going to get stuck in minutiae and unreasonable comparisons. Regardless, it distracts from the point... The issue is not 'is AoS more or less balanced than X?'. Any discussion on balance should simply be 'is AoS becoming more balanced over time?' Because, if it isn't, that suggests one of two things: a) it's accidental, therefore GW don't know how to balance things. b) it's deliberate, therefore GW aren't even searching for balance. Either option doesn't really leave us in a great place. What do people think? Is it gradually progressing towards balance? From my perspective, it's in very much the same state every year, with GW manipulating the meta pretty effectively. I don't like it but that's what I'm seeing.
  13. There's some pretty thin defenses of GW here. Yes, it's a small sample size. But it's the same picture with a larger sample size and has been for years. In December 2019, for example, when we had a full month of tournaments before coronavirus began to creep in, there was around a 30% difference in win rate between the top and bottom armies, even discounting those that barely played (Tzeentch 72.7% wins; Khorne 42.4%, and those aren't isolated cases). Also, the 'video games isn't a fair comparison' argument is straw-clutching. It's not being made because of the intricacies of game design. It's being made because it's a rank order of competitors. It could just as well be a comparison of snail racing, or thumb wrestling, or the annual Sit Down on a Chair Quickest championships. 'Um...actually...AoS doesn't even involve...' is missing the point completely. Ultimately, we have a massively skewed meta and, up to now, it's been a deliberate function of GW's game design. It's no accident that Tzeentch smashed 2017, Daughters and Legions smashed 2018, etc. The Design Studio aren't doing this by accident. Ben Johnson is one of the best players out there. He can see what a book is going to do on release. It's no coincidence that the army/armies with a mysterious advantage in the current meta is always the newest one(s). It's a deliberate move to sell new stuff. And I think it's probably fair enough. The world of online FAQs allows them to do it. In years gone by, if you put out filth, it was filth for years, until that book got replaced. Now, they can FAQ it. When they announced the FAQ process, we rejoiced. It would allow them to reign in outliers and keep the game in some sort of balance. Fantastic! Sadly that has not been the case. Firstly, GW have been far too heavy handed with their FAQing. Rather than tweaks, we get almost complete rewrites of books, invalidating our lovely hardbacks. Secondly, it allows for ridiculous sales-inducing rules at launch, because they know they can nerf them a few months later. This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's just GW using a new tool (the internet) to boost sales. They can control the meta in real time. Again, it's totally fair enough. It just means, for me, it's the illusion of a competitive game. Much as I love AoS, and I love AoS tournamenting, there's a massive degree of expensive meta chasing if you want to compete. That said, if you don't want to go to a tournament to win or you're a club / home gamer, it's a great game and there's a load of armies around that 'fat middle'. Last thing, I said earlier that this had been the case 'up to now'. Maybe an article like this, highlighting win ratios, is a sign of a change in the air. Maybe we'll going to get more transparency in future. Maybe GW are actually going to shoot for a balanced meta in future (and if they do, I'll be racing back tournament play). Or maybe they're just desperately trying to keep the competitive players interested while the tourney scene is on hold for Covid. We shall see...
  14. Yeah, we got a couple of rumour engines yesterday, both from the Warcry warbands.
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