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gjnoronh
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Posts posted by gjnoronh
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3 hours ago, EccentricCircle said:
That's and interesting take, and I definitely agree that building a group from people you already get along with can be less stressful than finding people who already play the game. I am partially sighted, so have never found "pick up games" at clubs of stores to be much fun. Even if the lighting is good enough for me to be able to play at all, I'll still have to start by explaining my disabilities to complete strangers, and hope that they accept that things are going to take longer, and that I'm not going to be able to read dice rolls from across the table, or necessarily recognise which units are which without going and looking. Its much more enjoyable to go into the game with people who know that to start with.
Gjnoronh: I've always found the cyclical nature of the Hobby's origins to be fascinating. D&D evolves out of historical wargaming via Chainmail, and then warhammer evolves out of Citadel Miniatures, many intended for D&D. Plus you have Fighting Fantasy books thrown into the mix as well, effectively three completely different genres of gaming all coming out of that early RP boom.
Yeah it's pretty amazing tracking through the history and of course D and D (and Warhammer Fantasy) owe a great deal to Papa Tolkien.
It's a bit generational because I'm older but it amazes me when I meet an AoS gamer who hasn't read Tolkien as I think he's the underlying foundation of all modern Fantasy literature and gaming.
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Great post.
Don't forget Warhammer started as a rules set designed to be used with miniatures purchased by Dungeons and Dragons players. Citadel/GW's start was supplying UK D and D players with miniatures. Eventually someone said people have these huge collections lets throw in some rules they can use for massed battles in our catalog. Early 40K and WFB had rules for build your own vehicles out of things like deoderant cannisters and paper models (in the boxed set!) for larger monsters as well as the assumption all terrain would be player built.
A launching system often tries to boot strap with minimal impediments to new players 'you can use your existing toys' i.e. Kings of War and then hopes folks develop enough loyalty to the system they want to buy miniatures designed with the system in mind. That's how Warhammer developed as a gaming system.
I think the most important thing is indeed the value of knowing "I can find a game once I invest in these models"
GW I think was stronger in my region of the US in past editions then it is now. AoS is better then 8th in those terms but it's still not as strong as it was in say 6th/7th in the areas I have lived in the last 20 years.
Best thing we can do is play publicly. Don't just play in our basements - play in our Friendly Local Gaming Stores and invite interested new gamers to join us. Get a core group of 4-6 whom you know you can make it and run a one day tournament open to all comers in your local store.
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I think it's probably a way to defend the Intellectual Property to the Old World. Keep it as an actively used by the company IP which protects it from others.
Also there is a big crowd of folks who still follow GW but haven't made the switch from the Old World to AoS. Grabs those customers back.
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24 minutes ago, EccentricCircle said:
Having the rules be free on the internet is great, but I always want physical copies of things. I love the feel of just sitting and reading a proper book, I just can't enjoy reading stuff on the computer as much, and trying to read from my phone is pretty much impossible with my eyesight. You'd think being able to zoom in would be a nice feature, but in practice you loose so much of the page when you do that it is massively impractical.
What I'd like to do at some point is print out sets of warscrolls for commonly used combinations of troops on big sheets of A3 card though. That way my army stats can all be laid out in front of me in several columns, rather than having to flick between pages or shufflecardds in order to find the right unit. I'd be able to make each scroll bigger than an official warscroll card too, which would be handy!
most units have their warscroll as a free download on the GW website.
I have generally downloaded. Laid out on A4 as I want, printed and then glued to a Cereal box cardboard piece to give them some heft.
Punch a hole in a corner and use a binder ring to keep them organized, or drop them in a gallon ziplock freezer bag when packing up.
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Golden Sprue cup is next on the calendar in January http://www.goldenspruecupgt.com/
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On 11/10/2019 at 2:08 AM, Sleboda said:
Hi folks,
I'm currently participating in a weekend of tournaments (Best Appearance Team yesterday, 2-1 today on day one of five game singles event so far ...) and I've noticed something.
More people are using phones with the AoS app to look up warscrolls than I've seen before. In two days I've faced six opponents, and I think four, maybe three, of them used the app instead of paper. It really stood out to me.
I don't know that a poll is needed (but maybe), but I'm interested in a general discussion of hard copy versus app for finding rules.
Me, personally, as an old, old man with bad eyes and I love of the smell of paper, just can't make the switch to digital. That said, I know lots of people feel differently.
What are your thoughts? Paper? Digital?
Key question: Does the setting make a difference? If you are playing basement games as opposed to tournaments, does that impact your choice?
Just curious.
As Joe knows I'm an old man as well.
I think for tournament AoS we have a very young group generally speaking. There are very few tournament stalwarts from 6th/7th/8th ed on the scene. There are some older players but not that many who have been continuously active on the tournament scene. Da Boyz had about 75 AoS people including judges and I think about 10% are long term tournament level players. That sort of reflected the crowd over 40 I would guess.
Personally I prefer printed warscroll cards as you can just have them on the table and leave them out to grab as needed.
I couldn't read rules effectively on my phone - but I could read rules on my Ipad.
Basement games without time pressure I'd be more willing to use electronic resources. That's often where I'm testing out a new list.
Tournament games I'd prefer printed materials organized so I could find what I want quickly. AoS Reminders is a great example of what I've historically just typed up for tournament AoS play.
Gary
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Da Boyz is in the books.
Results are up on our website:
http://www.daboyzgt.com/hall-of-heroes
FEC wins. No Slaanesh in the top ten.
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I'm no expert on this but GW had talked about it in White Dwarf maybe 10-15 years ago. Costs may have changed since then.
The issue is highly detailed injection plastic molds are pretty complicated to make and are big freaking thngs.
You can make a mold at home out of greenstuff or bluestuff and do simple resin or greenstuff casts of a piece of a miniature in about 20 minutes. but that's not going to maintain high detail fidelity long term or be able to handle the kind of industrial high speed turn arounds we'd expect. Home made casts for resin larger pieces are also pretty easy but significantly more complicated then a simple bluestuff mold. They still aren't up to long term high detail casting. Commercial resin casting is another step up and as we know from finecast are harder to manage to avoid miscasting then plastics. Metal casting is a still more challenging beast and requires more to it, not least of which is the replacement rate as the molds wear out from the heat of the molten metal. Fundamentally those technologies are things you could set up with a couple of skilled workers things you could get easily on the internet or at a hardware store and enough time. There are youtube videos available for all of these that could show you how you theoretically could do it at home.
Large scale injection molding plastic casting is purely an industrial process meaning you are talking about setting up a factory line to run this. Think long assembly lines and big expensive machines. It's not the kind of thing you are doing in your backyard. It's largely factories in China that all the miniature manufacturers are contracting their work out to.
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Agree entirely it's why companies selling plastic toys to kids (which usually aren't as nice as our toys) or plastic widgets for various home uses can do them at a relatively cheap price. There are a lot of kids out there eager to get their next Transformer or GI Joe kit or non branded knock off imitation. The costs of the mold get distributed amongst a lot more sales.
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Just one thought the math may not reflect consumer value issues as much as fixed production costs that are then spread across expected number of sales they expect to see.
We know in the past GW has said that the costs to produce a plastic mold are very high the last number I recall quoted (albeight a long time ago) was 100,000 pounds for a new mold. If sales of a model produced from a mold are low (character models where you might need one per army or an unpopular army) the fixed costs that they are distributing amongst the individual units sold ends up being pretty high per sale. If you've got a kit where you expect to sell lots the fixed costs are low per sale is low (edited to add some words to this sentence.)
On the other hand they may look at some kits as loss leaders - the starter boxes for all their games tend to be really good value for the contents. They may be selling them at a relative loss in the hopes it generates new players who buy more.
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2 hours ago, Sleboda said:
I don't know how long you've been a GW customer, but I can tell you that people have said that about the company for decades.
And yet they are still there, doing great.
Agree with Joe.I used to run an Internet Site in the mid 1990's for GW tactics. Before nice forum technology was a thing. Just text articles. I used to get comments on the website in 1995 that "GW prices have gotten insane this company can't last like this, I'm sure X company is going to take their place." Company X, and Y, and Z have all come and are now long gone but GW is still there.
Oddly company A, B and C have sprung up and despite years of 'irrational' GW price increases their price per model for these other companies tends to be the same or more then GW for the same size main line miniatures. Maybe other companies raise their prices to less fanfare because it seems odd that their prices seem about the same as the company that's 'irrationally' raising the price.
I've got a wife and two kids but my approach hasn't changed since I started in 1990. This is a hobby, these toy soldiers are expensive, I buy what I want but I don't confuse my hobby purchases with a need. GW price changes haven't changed my approach because I never treated it as 'cheap as chips' it's toys that I build and paint for games I generally love.
Gary
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I run the largest AoS Tournament in the North East US this year is 72 players. We're a cut below the biggest in the US (LVO, Adepticon, and NOVA)
We wrote our guidance before Cities of Sigmar and I'm still thinking about how to refresh things for 2020. It's essentially evolved from what our pack has said for years to reflect some changes in AoS (terrain!)
Here's what our pack says:
Conversions
Conversions are encouraged, but should be clear to a new opponent and must be based properly. If in doubt send us some pictures to review. Player brought terrain must be the actual GW model no proxies allowed, minor conversions of a GW piece to customize it are allowed. Forgeworld models should either be the actual GW model or have been previously approved by our team.
Non-GW/ProxiesModels from Non-GW ranges or Proxies are allowed, but should be clear to a new opponent and must be based properly. If in doubt send us some pictures to review. Forgeworld units and terrain are not allowed to be proxied.
You can not use the same proxied model to represent multiple different unit types in the same army. (Example: If you are proxying Sequitors with swords as actually having maces you can’t have some Sequitor units with swords who are armed as swords.)-
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Go read the thread - please.
Lets say you ask every player in the world to log their results, their terrain, and their skill level. Do you think you could even accurately get players to self assess their skill level?
Maybe you can get players to get you the data and can stratify it by scenario, match up, points level, realm, player skill levels, terrain density, terrain height, use of GW terrain warscrolls. Even if you start with tens of thousands of data points to evaluate when you are trying to determine balance you are going to have a lot of unique pairings of those variables to consider and end up with much smaller amounts of games in a specific situation to try and do analysis on
Computer gaming has it easier because all the data is captured on the interface - most games tend to have a way of assessing player success (as a proxy for skill level) and everything else is part of the existing data set as defined they've got access to.
Old school computing had the GIGO mantra "Garbage In= Garbage Out " if you don't know if you've got garbage for your inputs you can't rely on your outputs. Big data analysis can do some amazing thing but it's limited by having access to enough of the variables that are part of those data points to do something useful.
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17 hours ago, chord said:
This is where if GW embraces data science and technology they can use that to help provide balance.
With all respect I'm not sure you read the thread I linked to
it's worth a read if you are into thinking about the science of balancing a very complicated game.
I work in data intensive research. The problem is you don't have enough underlying information to do big data type analysis prior to releasing a book into the wild. Read the thread for a discussion about the kind of information you'd want (and right now there is no standardized system to actually quantify i.e. player skill level) Post being out in the wild if you could log the results of all the games you'd have a huge data set - but still not have information on underlying factors (heavy terrain, light terrain, skill level of the player.) For example Nighthaunt look a lot worse on a limited elevated terrain board then they do on a board with lots and lots of very tall pieces they can move onto, or that significantly impede the movement of their opponent.
And you'd still be asking yourself philosophically do we balance an army so it's balanced when two players of average skill play each other or when two highly skilled players play each other. The experience of most GW customers is driven by something around the 'average skill level' answer, the results of GT's which people tend to pay attention to are driven by the highly skilled answer. For many games and factions the answers will not be the same.
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Heck we know some of our forum members are play testers. In fact I believe Ben Curry who runs this forum is one of the playtesters.
But playtesting is tough see my previous post on the difficulty of getting balance right.
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22 hours ago, TheCovenLord said:
This game will never be as balanced as it could be and I believe the problem is two-fold. Your first statement I believe is an inherent issue with miniature wargaming that all systems will suffer from. The game is too hard to invest into, takes too much time (or money if you do not build/paint your own) for GW to make changes or shift blocks as quickly as say MTG.
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While we largely agree we disagree a bit on this point. There aren't many gaming systems that involve fielding as many 28 mm models as AoS. (9th Age, and KoW, and 40K as far as I know.) The barriers in switching from say one faction in Warmachine, or Bolt Action or Infinity to another is much smaller then in these large model count systems. Heck for some of these systems you might have a 10-20 model total size faction. Agree that card and computer games tend to have a much lower barrier to faction shift.
For those who are curious about math and philosophy of balance we had a long discussion on this forum a year ago it gets a bit esoteric but there is a lot in there about how hard it is to 'accurately' balance AoS when there is a lot of diversity of skill levels, terrains, tournament set ups in our community. If we all had the same baseline it would be easier to balance. As it stands it is very very hard to get a game as complicated as AoS to 'balance' well, and what's balanced in the hands of the worlds top players may be very imbalanced when played by the average joe, and vice versa.
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On 10/14/2019 at 9:57 AM, Dead Scribe said:
But then why is there always so much complaining about balance if balance is something not really considered or cared about?
Because if people try to make the game something it's not, the lack of balance gets to be a seriously disturbing problem. Particularly because the investment in fielding an army and switching it to something else in AoS is very high (money, and time spent as well as emotional investment involved in creating an army.)
Put $2500 cash on the table and participants get very angsty about balance issues. Treat winning or losing a game/tournament as a major change to your life you are going to worry about what's balanced.
Tell people play the game to have a fun time win or lose - balance doesn't matter as much. Some successful games are designed with intentional assymetry to win rates - to give players alternate options for fun. The reality is most games have fairly significant assymetry between best and worst factions in win rates but people tend not to make a big deal about it because the cost to switch factions is often less then in AoS.
GW's main audience isn't people who go to tournaments to win cash prizes. It's main audience is largely people who have never gone to a tournament or if they have they aren't approaching it with a mentality that winning is more important then having fun. There are certainly people like that in GW fandom but they aren't a large percentage of people.
Despite the marketing for other highly competitive games around cash prizes - the reality is for games the vast majority of players and dollars spent are for people who are playing games for fun. Some games market themselves around the cash competition at the top but that marketing is still mostly to people who are doing it for enjoyment not for a living.
AoS and GW are actually IMO more transparent in design intentions. It's a game designed to be a lot of fun to play and paint and collect and build. The designers hope we enjoy all that enough to want to buy more toys. It's not designed to be the ultimate tightly balanced competitive tournament game. The open ended and continuously iterative design process makes that impossible (a process followed by most tabletop gaming companies mind you.) But all the changes keep the game fresh and interesting and gives us cool new miniatures and lore to inspire us to buy and collect more toys.
It's not that GW can't do competitive games in fact Warhammer Underworlds was designed with competition in mind. AoS can be played competitively and can be tons of fun to play competitively
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Of course I know
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Da Boyz is full at 72 players but I'm taking wait list entries. (email us through the address on the website)
Crossroads has 2 slots left. -
You were destined to work for GW one day!
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Results are submitted to ITC every year.
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Hey man Gary from Da Boyz GT here. Nelson knows me from our regional organizing.
One suggestion is use the international communities and events sub forums to advertise. You'll notice I've been pumping Triumph over the years here, and to our Da Boyz attendees (Nelson is cc'd on some of those emails)
https://www.tga.community/forums/forum/18-events/
Certainly would appreciate cross promotion of Da Boyz. We've already hit our registration cap for 2019, but I'm ready to expand it a bit this year beyond our current 60 player cap. http://www.daboyzgt.com/
Gary
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173 registrations 55 for AoS Singles cap planned of 60
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Depends on who is defining it various ranking systems may use different approaches. There isn't an 'official' and universal definition. It depends on the rankings system involved.
ITC rankings system for example has their own definition I'm sure but I can't quite see on their site how they define it
In the old days of the defunct tournament scheduling website indygt dot com and their rankings system a "grand tournament" was by definition at least 2 days, at least 5 games, at least 35 players. However that was just for their listing and was influenced by the Direwolf community (which was the equivalent of Warhammer dot org before there was a warhammer dot org, which was TGA.community before this site existed.)
So I think you'd have to ask 'why' are you asking and in what context to help you answer.
it's worth a read if you are into thinking about the science of balancing a very complicated game.
Your local gaming and what you can do for it
in Age of Sigmar Discussions
Posted
maybe merge threads as they are highly related, and great discussions.