Time to Embrace the Horror II

[Mr Mystery]

Oh I enjoy the odd tournament. Most of the opponent's I've encountered have been fun to play against, and were absolutely no different to the spods I usually play in my area. That there always seems to be the odd one out who is the room's fun extractor is neither here nor there.

But I go into those Tournaments and gaming meets knowing the game I've chosen to play isn't perfectly balanced, and that as a result some of my games may be an uphill struggle - but I enjoy them all the same. Again, the minority who ruin the experience will ruin it regardless of what they're actually fielding just through being a poor sport.

And it's the 'but....I know, and have always known the game isn't perfectly balanced' that I'm driving at. This is the game GW have chosen to produce. They've never been especially bothered about achieving perfect balance, preferring to go with a plethora of options for their customers to pick and choose from. So a criticism the game isn't perfectly balanced just seems kind of pointless to me. I don't see how it can be a failing if it wasn't their objective?

[daboarder]

And it's the 'but....I know, and have always known the game isn't perfectly balanced' that I'm driving at. This is the game GW have chosen to produce. They've never been especially bothered about achieving perfect balance, preferring to go with a plethora of options for their customers to pick and choose from. So a criticism the game isn't perfectly balanced just seems kind of pointless to me. I don't see how it can be a failing if it wasn't their objective?

Honestly, if that was your actual point you wouldnt have been as belligerent, aggressive, dismissive and intolerant of these conversations as you have historically been. You dont think GW is making a balanced game? Well done join the club, most probably agree, maybe try not constantly attacking and dismissing those who either propose methods to "fix" said balance, lament the lack of said balance or hell, even just explain why said balance is important?

And you know what, none of that answers the question of why, if those are your actual thoughts on the matter, are you, as you so often put it, still here? given the OP is all about fixing the balance.

[Mr Mystery]

I don't knock attempts to balance things.

And I wouldn't say I'm particularly aggressive. I mean, it's not as if I drop into thread about a game I claim to despise on a regular basis in childish attempts to troll people and drown out criticism.

There's various threads about how one might judge if a game of AoS is about right before you actually play it. And good on them - that's a part of the hobby too.

But I guess it's easier to just throw around buzzwords like apologist (used incorrectly) white knight, fanboi etc than to engage and discuss.

[Houghten]

belligerent, aggressive, dismissive and intolerant

Goodbye forever.

[Defenestratus]

I honestly don't understand your reaction. I believe that 40K will be AoSed. You don't, or perhaps you believe that if it does so, that's a good thing. We disagree. I fail to see why you feel the need to hurl insults my way. I think 40k is gonna be AoSed and I think that's a bad thing. If I'm right, I intend to keep playing 7th edition and am positing to the community that perhaps we could try to fix the problems with the system, as I see them, since we will be staying with said edition far longer than we had done so in the past. It's a theoretical exercise. If you don't like it, or think we're (or perhaps just me) wasting our time, then, uhh ... don't participate?

... its a theoretical exercise that's been tried a hundred times over by a thousand different wargamers all of it being posted here on the internet. In the end, we all play the rules as printed in the books by GW unless a tournament organizer decides to change them. Mr. Lexington right there has sullied my Google Drive space with his "Warhammer 40,000 7th: Veterans Edition" ruleset which looks like it hasn't been touched since April and isn't complete. He's one of my best friends and I think he's on a fool's mission despite being a very intelligent dude.

If there is a balance problem - it's because two presumably grown adults can't agree between themselves to have a good time and not be jerks. Any attempt by some random guys on the internet to "balance" things is just going to imbalance the game in other ways. Whatever you change will just lead to other broken things. Nerf Wraithknights? Fine. For it. But don't be surprised when your rule set creates a new boogeyman that exploits your retooled rules and you're just back to the drawing board all over again. The only solution to this is for players to not be jerks because you'll never perfectly balance this game. Ever.

If you feel 40k is going to be AoS'd (which is a ridiculous idea on its face - GW would be goring it's sacred cow) then you can always keep playing RT/2nd/3rd/4th/5th/6th/7th edition. Heck, if it weren't for the fact hat I was dealing with moving across the country earlier this month, I would have been playing at the Oldhammer event in PA where it was a giant RT and 2nd edition festival.

[Erik Setzer]

Kazzigum raised an interesting point - people have been wanting a properly balanced game for years.

Yet, it's not happened. And I'm not particularly convinced GW have ever promised their games are entirely balanced.

I do have empathy for those whose Tournament experience is ruined by Billy No-Mates and his cheesey list of beardoom. But....for better or worse, GW just aren't all that interested in writing a completely water tight, perfectly balanced game.

The fact they've not done this despite calls for it over a couple of decades is pretty obvious, no?

It's very hard to find "perfect balance," so I won't entirely expect that. But right now the game feels so much like rock-paper-scissors. If you don't have the right units - and sometimes, if you bring the wrong faction - you're going to get rolled over, no chance, just a bleak, awful game. And it's not because people are being jerks. It's because some armies are just designed to be really powerful, while others are designed to... Well, honestly, I can't explain the design of some armies (hello, Orks and Dark Eldar!). I've never felt as much in the past as I do now that every game is predetermined. Worse, they swung the pendulum hard in less than a year's time with codices being all over the place.

And then they just add the icing on top of the cake with the webstore exclusives. Some of the stuff in the newer books was bad enough, but telling people that if they buy repackaged Assault Squads, Devastators, and Drop Pods they'll get the rules to ignore limitations on Deep Striking, it's pretty blatant that balance became totally unimportant and money is more important than customer enjoyment (which is really, really stupid, because pissing off customers is a good way to have them become ex-customers and not recommend your products). That formation was the true "jumping the shark" moment for me. The Battle Company was bad enough, even worse than the formation in WD where you get all kinds of bonuses just for being a good customer and buying all the new toys. But a formation whose special rules are all basically, "Hey, you know those limitations to keep Deep Striking from being too powerful, just ignore them as our way of saying thanks for your money, chum!"? Yeah, bit too much, that.

In the past, they did make an attempt at balance and keeping things as good as they could. They redid the Dark Eldar and Dark Angels books in 3rd edition because both had issues. They completely remade the Chaos Marines book before 3rd edition was over. These updates didn't coincide with a bunch of new releases (and you could just download errata or FAQ to update your existing book instead of buying a new one). They were just there to try to fix balance issues.

But that was when GW admitted they were a games workshop, and still had guys like Andy, Alessio, and Tuomas on board. Now, the games are fair game for the board to abuse in an attempt to sell more toys.

- - - Updated - - -

But given the big cheese of the Design Studio isn't a fan of restricting what people can and can't take - isn't this simply wishful thinking? If a game isn't designed for perfect balance and competitive play, is it any surprise it takes quite a bit of end user tinkering to get it half way suitable?

If your game requires heavy work on the end of the players to actually be able to play it, then you have no business charging $85 for the core rules and $50-$60 for most of the army books.

And seriously, guys, balance isn't just for "competitive play." It's so you can meet Johnny Wants-to-Have-Friends and play a nice game with him and feel like you're in the same ballpark of balanced armies without having to spend an hour with someone you just met trying to hash out an agreement on what the two of you think is fair. It's necessary for casual play. If you don't care about balance or anything like that, then why bother with the rules as they are? Why buy those expensive books? Why not make up your own rules, mix in stuff from other games? Why even have rules? Rules are designed to provide a balanced framework, but since balance is a dirty word only meant for tournaments, then when you're not in a tournament you can just play without rules, right? Lay out your collection, debate who would win, pack them back up, and call it a day.

Hey, it works for Superfight. Granted, Superfight is ridiculously cheap, too.

[40kGamer]

To be fair, sportsmanship was often a gamed system (Shout out to balck blow fly and the 40k wrecking crew, thanks for breaking it ) and professional paint services were not nearly as prolific. So those particular scoring methods are less likely to work these days.

Personally I prefer the softer "positive reinforcement" approach where sportsmanship and painting dont necessarily contribute directly to rankings, but have additional prize support that is equal to that of the actual game winners.

Throw in another category "background/short story" and ensure that one person cant walk away with all the prizes and it should go a long way to limiting the crazy builds, even the most hard core players typically are enamored with the games background and like "narrative games"

Sigh... so true. The Sports system I like locally gives you 'medals to hand out' If it's a 3 game event you get 1 gold, 3 silver and 1 bronze. If you have a great game at the event they get a gold, a not fun game a bronze and just regular ok games get silvers. Players get enough silver medals that they don't have to give out the gold or bronze if they don't want to. Still room for abuse between mates but it works better than the other sports systems I've seen.

As for paint... ugh... I always forget about the proliferation of painting services. I did go to one larger event where I later found out that the army I picked for best appearance was professionally painted. Really irked me as I think the paint skill is just as important an aspect of the overall hobby as winning games.

Back onto improving the game balance... I still believe it would have to be addressed with a mathematical/statistical model to compare unit effectiveness across all factions. No one is going to invest the time in this since GW changes their entire army design philosophy on a dime which could invalidate the entire system... for those who don't believe they change their design philosophy on a dime look at the codex cycles for the last 20 years, they have NEVER finished a full codex update cycle without changing the design philosophy 1 or more times in the process.

At some point they will *******ize the game to the point that it is no longer 40k (a matter of when not if), so then someone interested enough could do it. Formations that award free models would have to be tossed and formations that award special rules to the units would have to be assigned a points value under any sensible mechanic. Seriously... The formations they've rolled out simply prove that even they know their points system is a bad joke.

[Erik Setzer]

Here's a hint - 20 years later, and GW have made a pretty bold statement with AoS, which doesn't really support a 'we endeavour to make balance absolutely perfect so games are determined purely by player skill'.

Now, whatever you think of that attitude from GW - it is what it is.

AoS is, to be blunt, the barest effort they could make to still have a game in which to place their toys, because they still think people buy their toys first and then decide to buy the game to have something to do with their toys. The reality that people buy GW's toys to play the games seems to have escaped them right now. The lack of effort they put into the games resulted in WFB's demise. The irony is that, while they continue to claim their premium toys are the big draw and ignore mentioning games wherever possible, the replacement of WFB with AoS to try to restart sales of their fantasy line of toys shows that somewhere in their minds they *do* recognize that the games are the main draw for selling the toys, not the other way around. If they replaced a game in order to sell toys that weren't selling and still can't figure out that the games are what drive their sales, then they might all be blind, deaf lobotomy patients.

In the past, they knew that games were what drove their business. Sure, the main money came off the toys, but you can't sell the toys as well without a reason for people to buy them, because there's a lot of competition for toys, but Warhammer and 40K had built themselves into the biggest games around. People bought GW's toys rather than, say, Reaper or Heartbreaker (well, some of us bought both) because they wanted to play GW's games. There've always been better toys out there, but you couldn't play GW games with them.

So as they throw out all the old design team, leaving just one guy left who rages about the tournaments he created and watching as one of the creators of the game that got them started helps promote a competing game, they've lost sight of all that. And I doubt anyone left wants to tell them they're going down the wrong path, and constantly trying to reduce costs to keep profit while sales shrink is not going to work long-term, especially if they keep abusing the games that drive the sales of their toys. If they get 40K too much more broken, it could potentially hit the point WFB did, where it's too expensive to get into (already there) and, once you're in, it's just rock-paper-scissors and you could be spending three hours at a time (and hundreds of dollars) just watching the inevitable play out because you didn't pick the right army or units and need to spend hundreds more dollars for the right ones. At that point, the players aren't going to keep dropping hundreds of dollars on something that they have to fix themselves, they're going to move on to other games, and 40K will start shedding players like WFB did.

Personally, I'd prefer to avoid that, but hey, people who are glad to help burn the whole thing down are enjoying themselves, I guess.

[grimmas]

I actually think the OP is on the right track. Changes to the force organisation in a tournament pack could really be the way to provide better balance for tournaments where people wanted it. I'm not sure if I'd restrict people to just using CAD but that might work. I might also try putting limits of the number of non troops choices it might help with some of the worst offences. It's a shame GW have produced a good selection of formations for every faction yet requiring people to choose one may have helped.

I don't think it would be possible to completely balance 40K as there are just to many variations to choose from many of which depend on the situation as to how effective they are but you could make it suit your needs better. I certainly wouldn't get rid of the choices they are very much part of the 40K appeal.

I would remind people that GW did and still does apply some form of extra comp for their own tournaments so it would be logical that any TO should do to.

[Captain Bubonicus]

If you feel 40k is going to be AoS'd (which is a ridiculous idea on its face - GW would be goring it's sacred cow) then you can always keep playing RT/2nd/3rd/4th/5th/6th/7th edition. Heck, if it weren't for the fact hat I was dealing with moving across the country earlier this month, I would have been playing at the Oldhammer event in PA where it was a giant RT and 2nd edition festival.

I wouldn't put it past them. How many times in the past have we said - "no, GW couldn't POSSIBLY be that stupid," only to be proven wrong?