10th edition tournament results - it doesn't look good

[Kallas]

5 minutes ago, Rain said:

This is a good analogy. And it would be one thing if the abuses were weird obscure combos, but come on. Fire Prisms were obviously undercosted for what you get, and they get better as you spam them because of their prism fire thing. That doesn’t take 100’s of games to catch.

The simple fact that the Deathwatch/Sternguard combo got through their QA means...well, their QA is non-existant. Yes, the patched it out quickly enough, but the fact that something that obvious got through to the release copy is damning.

[Ahzek451]

41 minutes ago, Karhedron said:

 

 We players should not be beta-testing GWs rules and points values.

At least the vast majority of it. 

[Redcomet]

26 minutes ago, Ahzek451 said:

At least the vast majority of it. 

But maybe we should.

 

Paizo has beta tested main editions and new classes with the players, and I know for a fact the game is better beaten of it, as several people unfortunate rules and imbalances have been caught by the community. Is the game perfect? No, but having thousands of people weigh in has been a boon. Ditch the 3 year edition grind and ask the player base for feedback.

 

A good game benefit’s everyone, even the bean counters and shareholders in the end

[Doghouse]

1 hour ago, Karhedron said:

My real complaint is that more testing should have been done before the launch of 10th edition. We players should not be beta-testing GWs rules and points values.

 

This is the nail on the head for me, right now I think we are actually beta testing 11th.

 

I personally think the three year rehash should end, they should stretch it out over six years and have a three year mid edition big splash boxed set product release because people are going to buy it on the scale of a new edition release no matter what it is. 

[Ahzek451]

4 minutes ago, Doghouse said:

 

This is the nail on the head for me, right now I think we are actually beta testing 11th.

 

I personally think the three year rehash should end, they should stretch it out over six years and have a three year mid edition big splash boxed set product release because people are going to buy it on the scale of a new edition release no matter what it is. 

Not a half bad idea. The crux is that no matter what we suggest or come up with, GW is going to keep doing the same ol' practices until something gives(drop in sales/interest), it's hard seeing GW doing any sort of major shakeup, but if they did another big pole like they did before, and more people jumped on them for "additional playtesting" and "longer edition lifespan with an emphasis on a more finely tuned product", that might be something. 

Edited August 24, 2023 by Ahzek451

[Karhedron]

2 hours ago, Redcomet said:

Paizo has beta tested main editions and new classes with the players, and I know for a fact the game is better beaten of it, as several people unfortunate rules and imbalances have been caught by the community. Is the game perfect? No, but having thousands of people weigh in has been a boon. Ditch the 3 year edition grind and ask the player base for feedback.

 

I see your point and I am fully in favour of rebalancing units based on tournament performance. But I still think GW should have done some playtesting. I would not have taken many test games to reveal that Death Guard are trailing far behind the field or Eldar are dangerously overpowered (and I admit that as a life-long Eldar player).

[DemonGSides]

3 hours ago, Doghouse said:

 

This is the nail on the head for me, right now I think we are actually beta testing 11th.

 

I personally think the three year rehash should end, they should stretch it out over six years and have a three year mid edition big splash boxed set product release because people are going to buy it on the scale of a new edition release no matter what it is. 

 

It's literally just 8th and 9th edition paradigms repeated. 8th kinds blew and 9th was a lot better, more refined version of it.

 

The ideal would be "editions" being small changes to a ruleset that we all kinda like. I think GW is still trying to figure out what people like; they want infantry that are impactful, and also want vehicles to not be useless. Those are hard things to manage across the variety of factions without everything starting to feel samey. I don't envy the position they've gotten themselves into with how big the game is now. 

[Lexington]

3 hours ago, Doghouse said:

This is the nail on the head for me, right now I think we are actually beta testing 11th.

 

This may or may not end up being effectively true - who knows what the future holds - but I think the concept requires too much organization and planning to be intentionally true. It really seems like what happened is that the Studio radically shifted design philosophy somewhere midway through 10th's development for whatever reason, and we got...well, we got what we got. Given the reception it's gotten, I wouldn't be enormously surprised to see 11th end up as another "from scratch" edition.

[Karhedron]

1 hour ago, Lexington said:

Given the reception it's gotten, I wouldn't be enormously surprised to see 11th end up as another "from scratch" edition.

 

I hope not as that would repeat the problems. I quite like the 10th ruleset so far and the ideas of units with their own special rules on the cards is quite good. The balance is where it really seems to fall down. Hopefully a combination of full codices and points tweaks will fix things. We should have a better idea once the Nid and Marine codices are out.

[Jorin Helm-splitter]

6 hours ago, Doghouse said:

 

This is the nail on the head for me, right now I think we are actually beta testing 11th.

 

I personally think the three year rehash should end, they should stretch it out over six years and have a three year mid edition big splash boxed set product release because people are going to buy it on the scale of a new edition release no matter what it is. 

 

My concern is that we aren't beta testing anything. GW is changing editions so quickly that I'm not really sure how much our feedback affects anything. They also don't learn from their mistakes, for example giving every unit in a detachment a re-roll to hit and a re-roll to wound has proven to be really strong. I understand why GW likes it because its intuitive, but there is a reason they took it away from Salamanders and probably need to take it away from Eldar. They also didn't apply any of the lessons they learned from Miracle dice to Strands of Fate. I would love it if they had a play test program, I actually think it's the only way the game will get more balanced because it's just not feasible for them to have enough play testers to figure this stuff out. 

 

I would love to see longer editions, and I think that if they had other products that were as generous as the edition launch sets they would probably be as successful. Not sure if they're willing/able to take that risk. 

 

On 8/23/2023 at 5:38 PM, Karhedron said:

To no real surprise, Eldar continue to dominate the top tables with a supporting cast of Knights, Custodes and smattering of others.

 

https://www.goonhammer.com/competitive-innovations-in-10th-20230823/

 

Is the imminent overreaction going to nerf Eldar into oblivion come September?

 

I think that their reaction probably won't be enough again, and then they'll drop the hammer on them during the 3rd pass. That tends to be their pattern for better or worse. Granted we may see some large power spikes as codex are released. I actually expect it because I don't think GW wants any part of a "free ruleset" time will tell though. 

[Metzombie]

I so not disagree with need for better Balancing and more time between edition to make it work, but it is not realy viable or even realistic to say they need to do more playtesting.

Lets say for testing every faction plays against every other faction. And lets say each game takes 3 hours.

We are now looking at a playtime of a littel over 1 month. For one Game! And I did not even includ the diffrent Chapters.

Now how many testgames would be needed for good balance? Maybe 10-20? Maybe more. Now you need to do that for every detachment an army can take. And after all that time testing you need to fix all the issue. And after that you need to more or less start the testing all over again to make sure your fixes worked.

Repeat untli no more fixes are needed. Or untill the heat death of the univers. Whatever heppensd sooner.

[MegaVolt87]

Tournament games are like a speedrun to find balance issues. Its the same with videogames, hardcore gamers hit the problems weeks/ months ahead of casual gamers. Then the casuals catch up and complain about the same things the hard core gamers found. Tale as old as time. If GW insists on the three year cycle, every codex neds to be ready at launch. Otherwise we need a four year cycle with every codex released in the first 6-12 months. I don't consider a warhammer edition launched until every army has their codex.  So to me, the past few editions have only been 1-1.5 years long based on complete codex releases for everyone in some cases. 

Edited August 25, 2023 by MegaVolt87

[Progenitor]

9 hours ago, Metzombie said:

I so not disagree with need for better Balancing and more time between edition to make it work, but it is not realy viable or even realistic to say they need to do more playtesting.

Lets say for testing every faction plays against every other faction. And lets say each game takes 3 hours.

We are now looking at a playtime of a littel over 1 month. For one Game! And I did not even includ the diffrent Chapters.

Now how many testgames would be needed for good balance? Maybe 10-20? Maybe more. Now you need to do that for every detachment an army can take. And after all that time testing you need to fix all the issue. And after that you need to more or less start the testing all over again to make sure your fixes worked.

Repeat untli no more fixes are needed. Or untill the heat death of the univers. Whatever heppensd sooner.

I'm pretty sure that all of us here would be happy if GW took an entire 12 months to play test the basic rules of an edition, even if that broke GW's 3 year cycle, taking it to 4 years, or even 5. I have no issue with that as we'd get a better game for it. The bean counters may get more upset as they're not getting their big box releases in the same cycle but as has been mentioned already that's an easy fix. Just release a campaign box, or a mid-edition "update" box and you'll still get people buying into it, perhaps even more so if there's been a few years of decent balance in the game too! 

 

It seems like when it comes to the triangle of project management, you can select two options from doing a project right, fast or cheap, GW are picking fast and cheap every time and so that's why we get what we get. I also think that they are very much narrative gamers at heart (this comes through in spades in WD articles) and things like the -3 on Fleshborers comment certainly seems to lead into that, so I think that filters what they write even for competitive matched play rules and while there's a good number of us who don't play tournaments, I'd wager Matched Play is the most popular way to play because it provides an easy "balanced" way that you know what you're getting, casually or otherwise. When I think of my Sisters their narrative performance is the holy trinity. Now that melta has been nerfed they are very under-gunned when it comes to taking out armour which just got a buff in the new edition and vehicles are more prevalent in the meta. So an army here suffers in its ability to play the game outside of spamming Castigators and maybe (if you're insane) Nundams so you can try to melee things with the Maces. That's without even looking at issues like World Eaters, Death Guard, Votann etc.... that have all kinds of problems too. 

 

I certainly wouldn't care if we hadn't have gotten tenth until 2024 because it took time to play test so the game was in a better spot. 

[phandaal]

1 hour ago, Progenitor said:

I'd wager Matched Play is the most popular way to play because it provides an easy "balanced" way that you know what you're getting, casually or otherwise.

 

This is exactly it. People gravitate towards the "trustless" version of any ruleset. The why's of this have been argued over endlessly here and elsewhere, so it is definitely not worth derailing another thread, but this is the reason so many people follow tournament performance despite never playing tournaments themselves.

 

2 hours ago, Progenitor said:

I certainly wouldn't care if we hadn't have gotten tenth until 2024 because it took time to play test so the game was in a better spot. 

 

GW seems to have gone the opposite direction, testing the game less because of the possibility of leaks from their testers.

[Rain]

14 hours ago, Metzombie said:

I so not disagree with need for better Balancing and more time between edition to make it work, but it is not realy viable or even realistic to say they need to do more playtesting.

Lets say for testing every faction plays against every other faction. And lets say each game takes 3 hours.

We are now looking at a playtime of a littel over 1 month. For one Game! And I did not even includ the diffrent Chapters.

Now how many testgames would be needed for good balance? Maybe 10-20? Maybe more. Now you need to do that for every detachment an army can take. And after all that time testing you need to fix all the issue. And after that you need to more or less start the testing all over again to make sure your fixes worked.

Repeat untli no more fixes are needed. Or untill the heat death of the univers. Whatever heppensd sooner.

The perfect need not be the enemy of the good. Sure, they can’t playtest every single permutation against every other permutation of every army, but they can at least do a few games per army, with some obvious builds. It doesn’t take a lot of games to see that some armies are much stronger than others.

 

It doesn’t even take games to see that the original incarnation of fate dice was grossly OP, or that Custodes are “just better” than armies like Death Guard, Sisters, or World Eaters. You can just read the datasheets and special rules, and you should be struck by a “hmm, this seems too strong relative to that.” You can then play games to confirm it, and should adjust accordingly. 
 

People on this very forum called out questionable things as early as the teases, and got the usual “wait for XYZ, stop being chicken little” BS from the usual suspects.

[Karhedron]

I agree, you don't need to test every army against every other exhaustively. Space Marines are the most common beginners' army so if you take them as your baseline, then you just need to make sure every other army is tested against Marines for balance.

 

Sure you will probably get some outliers and rock-paper-scissors scenarios but it will be a lot better than how 10th landed.

[jaxom]

22 hours ago, Karhedron said:

 

I see your point and I am fully in favour of rebalancing units based on tournament performance. But I still think GW should have done some playtesting. I would not have taken many test games to reveal that Death Guard are trailing far behind the field or Eldar are dangerously overpowered (and I admit that as a life-long Eldar player).

Tweaking points works when the unit profiles and rules are well written. For example, Death Guard would have to be pointed worryingly low to give them the numbers on the board their current rules require to do anything with their infantry. The current interaction between Fate Dice and Devastating Wounds should see certain Eldar units exorbitantly costed. 

[Rain]

1 hour ago, jaxom said:

Tweaking points works when the unit profiles and rules are well written. For example, Death Guard would have to be pointed worryingly low to give them the numbers on the board their current rules require to do anything with their infantry. The current interaction between Fate Dice and Devastating Wounds should see certain Eldar units exorbitantly costed. 

 

There's also the fact that points tweaks alone can break the theme of a faction. Death Guard should not be a swarm army except for plague zombie builds. Plague Marines should be more expensive than regular CSM, while also having noticeably better resilience, plague themed weapons, and maybe move 1 inch slower. The "faction fantasy" of Death Guard is having an army of juggernauts that roll forward, being frustratingly difficult to kill, and excelling at close to mid range shooting with various plague weapons.

 

And GW can make close/mid range armies that are frustratingly difficult to kill, just look at Necrons. Necrons aren't even especially powerful, but they are functional, and play the way that their faction fantasy presents them without feeling like you are playing the mooks in an action movie.

[jaxom]

I would be a-okay if the Contagion rule became a Detachment rule and the faction rule gave them re-roll saving throws. Still makes AP meaningful against them (no flat shrugging off damage with Invul save or  FnP, at least without character support), but helps a lot more in the current mechanics of the game than being T5 (though that should stay, it's a nice perk). I've accepted that "less rerolls" really means "targeted application of rerolls" and this would be the only source for a DG reroll other than a Chaos Lord (off the top of my head, don't quote me on that ).

[Special Officer Doofy]

1 hour ago, jaxom said:

I would be a-okay if the Contagion rule became a Detachment rule and the faction rule gave them re-roll saving throws. Still makes AP meaningful against them (no flat shrugging off damage with Invul save or  FnP, at least without character support), but helps a lot more in the current mechanics of the game than being T5 (though that should stay, it's a nice perk). I've accepted that "less rerolls" really means "targeted application of rerolls" and this would be the only source for a DG reroll other than a Chaos Lord (off the top of my head, don't quote me on that ).

 

I would be a-okay with their 5+++ FNP coming back as their faction ability personally.

[Focslain]

6 minutes ago, Special Officer Doofy said:

 

I would be a-okay with their 5+++ FNP coming back as their faction ability personally.

Personally would prefer the -1 damage version, would allow more damage to get thru. At least against my local DG player, he had a 80% success rate on FNP saves. 

[Sergeant Bastone]

On 8/24/2023 at 2:49 AM, Karhedron said:

I gather that 'b' is apart of the problem. According to a friend, there was no actual methodical playtesting of the new army lists with time set aside to balance things. There was just whatever games people played in their lunch breaks.

I once heard somebody say that GW found that codexes that had been extensively playtested didn't sell any better than ones that hadn't and thus GW doesn't really consider playtesting to be something worth spending time/money on.  

[crimsondave]

On 8/24/2023 at 11:53 AM, Doghouse said:

 

This is the nail on the head for me, right now I think we are actually beta testing 11th.

 

I personally think the three year rehash should end, they should stretch it out over six years and have a three year mid edition big splash boxed set product release because people are going to buy it on the scale of a new edition release no matter what it is. 

This is the answer.  Problem is I’m not sure GW is willing to risk the mid edition box not selling as well as a new edition box.  I wish they’d at least try it.

[jaxom]

1 hour ago, crimsondave said:

This is the answer.  Problem is I’m not sure GW is willing to risk the mid edition box not selling as well as a new edition box.  I wish they’d at least try it.

I feel like they’ve had better results with AoS compared to 40k with the non-launch battleboxes.

[Rogue]

It comes down to why people buy boxes like Leviathan. If it's mostly for the new rules and mission cards, then a mid-edition box is likely to sell less well. But if it's for a chunk of new and significantly discounted models, then sales could still be good.

 

And I guess factions would be the other critical factor. Lots of people play marines, who are usually half the box. Would a box sell as well if it were two non-marine factions? On the other hand, GW currently generate enough new content to get marine players interested every three years, so they could still do that even without a new rule-set.

 

Maybe replace the rules with a pair of codexes for the included factions.