More 11th Edition Boxset Rumours

[Flaherty]

2 hours ago, Karhedron said:

 

I don't know about those exact numbers but even if they are accurate, I don't see the problem. Using tournament data to improve game balance benefits both tournament and casual players. There is literally nothing that is detrimental to casual play.

 

And if you feel matched play is not for you then you can change it however you like between friends. 

It comes down to how much you view ad hoc rule balancing as part of the hobby versus an annoying distraction. 

I'm all for competitive players having finely tuned rules, but that balance doesn't necessarily translate into a better experience for casual players. For example, the designers optimize the competitive game by balancing point costs, detachments, strategems, keywords, enhancements, and primary and secondary missions. That's half a dozen different factors you need to understand in order to play.

 

If you were catering to a more casual player base, you could have streamlined rules that get you playing faster and put more emphasis on fun in other parts of the gameplay experience.

 

All that said, I think GW does a decent job with balancing their player communities. Warhammer Quest and Kill Team are good products for more casual players. I just wish they'd devote a few more resources to them. WQ could be a great flagship product if it weren't competing with Underworlds, which might be a better product if it weren't competing with Spearhead, which seems to be the revealed preference over mainline AoS for that product range. I'm glad Legions Imperialis exists, and that HH gets a steady stream of releases, but I do wish KT got a bit more focus and manufacturing allocation at the factory. It's a great game, limited by the fact that every new box is scalped in seconds and the rules are hard to come by otherwise.

 

[Scribe]

2 hours ago, Karhedron said:

Using tournament data to improve game balance benefits both tournament and casual players. There is literally nothing that is detrimental to casual play.

 

I dont drop the 'respectful' disagree lightly, but this is brutally false.

 

The last what, decade of the game, has been overwhelmingly balanced towards, influenced by, tournament play. An utter fraction of the playerbase. It has done NOTHING to improve the game for casual pickup players in any way whatsoever.

 

There are games, where a strong group of competitive players aid in balance and therefore the wider player base. When an army thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours of investment, only to be invalidated by the next beta update of the rules?

 

That aint it.

 

Casuals have been forced out of the game that is for some bizarre reason (wonder who the Whales are...) chasing after an absolutely tiny number of players in reality.

[jaxom]

Reading through the new article...

 

I took a closer look at the Speeder:

There are rockets at the back. The pintle might be a horizontally oriented melta or maybe a flamer?

 

The Ultramarine has a Mk6 style shoulder pad

 

 

Edited 18 hours ago by jaxom

[SvenIronhand]

I just want to see the new Marines already. What a tease, GW.

[Dark Shepherd]

Whatd the datasheet difference going to be between the new landspeeder and storm speeder? Just more glass cannony?

[Larkhainan]

Auspex outlined that this process took a month last time

 

Though I'm a little disappointed the phobos rumor didn't pan out, I really just wanna see what the vanvets look like in model form. So I assume that'll happen late april XD

  

5 minutes ago, Dark Shepherd said:

Whatd the datasheet difference going to be between the new landspeeder and storm speeder? Just more glass cannony?

isn't it like half the size? I assume lower toughness, less firepower and cheaper?

 

I am sort of assuming a flying version of the mario kart atv thing

Edited 17 hours ago by Larkhainan

[SvenIronhand]

Judging from the shot in the article, it has an Assault Cannon and pylon-mounted rockets for AT work.

[phandaal]

4 hours ago, Karhedron said:

 

I don't know about those exact numbers but even if they are accurate, I don't see the problem. Using tournament data to improve game balance benefits both tournament and casual players. There is literally nothing that is detrimental to casual play.

 

And if you feel matched play is not for you then you can change it however you like between friends. 

 

Tournament play and casual play are very different experiences.

 

Tournament players have to have the most airtight possible rules construction, because they are going to push to the absolute limits of what the rules allow them to do.

 

Casual settings where people are playing for fun and fluff are much more likely to deploy the Golden Rule and fudge things one way or the other.

 

It is different people with different goals playing different games.

 

I actually have examples from my own gaming group where most do "casual" games that do not benefit from rules written for tournament players, or from quarterly beta points updates, but my experience on this forum is that any example I give will be met with the one guy who played in a tournament seven years ago where they didn't use L-shaped terrain.

 

So instead, I will use airtight logic and appeal to the ultimate authority: Games Workshop. Do we think they would be modifying their rules to be fluffier and less tournament-ified (this is a real word) if they thought it was NOT something that would at least be perceived as a benefit to their customers? Seems to me like they figured out what a lot of us have been saying for years now, and are deciding there is enough truth to it that it would benefit them to build their product more around the main game mode - i.e., casual play.

Edited 17 hours ago by phandaal

[HeadlessCross]

1 hour ago, Scribe said:

 

I dont drop the 'respectful' disagree lightly, but this is brutally false.

 

The last what, decade of the game, has been overwhelmingly balanced towards, influenced by, tournament play. An utter fraction of the playerbase. It has done NOTHING to improve the game for casual pickup players in any way whatsoever.

 

There are games, where a strong group of competitive players aid in balance and therefore the wider player base. When an army thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours of investment, only to be invalidated by the next beta update of the rules?

 

That aint it.

 

Casuals have been forced out of the game that is for some bizarre reason (wonder who the Whales are...) chasing after an absolutely tiny number of players in reality.

Nothing stops you from casual play. However, if the game is so unbalanced that 2000 points of Marines outperforms 4000 points of Militarum, then how will those lopsided games be fine to begin with?

[Xenith]

46 minutes ago, phandaal said:

Tournament players...are going to push to the absolute limits of what the rules allow them to do.

We used to call those players dirty, beardy and cheesy, and 100% not in the spirit of the game. 

[HeadlessCross]

1 minute ago, Xenith said:

We used to call those players dirty, beardy and cheesy, and 100% not in the spirit of the game. 

Why should a game be able to be broken to begin with?

[Xenith]

Because it was designed as a loose ruleset to use your tiny dudesmen in tabletop battles, and allowed them to do cool stuff. As the game has become more and more competitively focussed, the overton window of socially acceptable gameplay has shifted from someone abusing rules interactions being shunned by their local community, to it being par for the course until it gets FAQ'd.

 

It was standard practice to bring friendly lists, and ask opponents permission/consent if you wanted to use a tough 'tournament list', but now they're all tournament lists otherwise you just lose the game.

Edited 16 hours ago by Xenith

[Scribe]

53 minutes ago, HeadlessCross said:

Nothing stops you from casual play. However, if the game is so unbalanced that 2000 points of Marines outperforms 4000 points of Militarum, then how will those lopsided games be fine to begin with?

 

Yes, hyperbole is always the best course of action.

[01RTB01]

1 hour ago, HeadlessCross said:

Why should a game be able to be broken to begin with?

All games are able to be broken.

 

Seriously, at what point do you stop? It's the same crap day in day out rinse and repeat from you. 

[Scribe]

2 hours ago, HeadlessCross said:

Why should a game be able to be broken to begin with?

 

You've just spent 3 years beta testing a game, you tell me why.

[Evil Eye]

3 hours ago, HeadlessCross said:

Why should a game be able to be broken to begin with?

...Literally any system can be broken or cheesed unless it is A: incredibly simplistic and B: COMPLETELY symmetrical. Chess (which is incredibly simplistic compared to a tabletop wargame, not actually simplistic per se) is about as close to perfectly balanced as a tabletop game can be, and debates rage to this day over how to compensate for the disadvantage black has in going second. When you have a system that is intended first and foremost to simulate battles in a fictional future in a manner that is entertaining, with tens of thousands of possible permutations of army composition alone, there is no game designer, alive, dead or yet to be born that could make it "unbreakable". It is not possible, and proclaiming a system to be bad because it can be broken- ESPECIALLY one that was from the inception of the game in the late 80s supposed to be an immersive/narrative-based experience, not an airtight competitive sport with little to no margin for error, is absolutely ridiculous. Any game (not just tabletop) with more than one strategy/path to victory WILL be "broken" once people find the optimally efficient method to achieving the win-condition; the Solved Game Problem. And it's not even limited to games, it's just the way evolution of anything works, hence why marine arthropods tend towards evolving into crab-like body plans (Carcinization I believe it's called), the biggest and most diverse order of animals on the planet by far is beetles ('cuz the basic beetle anatomy is HUGELY adaptable to different environments and at its core incredibly solid), tanks now look very similar to each other rather than being all sorts of weird and wacky shapes... the difference is, with a game- where you're both playing to enjoy yourself- taking the peak efficiency path is actually counterproductive. But just because a game can be solved doesn't mean it's not worth playing, and nor is it worth trying to make a game that cannot be solved, because that is impossible and will only result in a miserable experience in pursuit of an unachievable goal. And deciding something shouldn't exist because it's possible (not likely, POSSIBLE) for it to go awry/wrong is absurd. By that logic, as it's possible for a hobbyist to build and paint their models badly, we shouldn't have glue, paints or brushes and models should come pre-painted and pre-assembled.

[Wispy]

i'm not going to be happy until i can deploy melta flamer speeders again. 

[ThaneOfTas]

8 hours ago, HeadlessCross said:

Why should a game be able to be broken to begin with?

Just go play checkers if you want something where perfect balance is the primary concern. Nice and simple, no unnecessary dice rolls, no lore to  limit what units you can take, no broken rules, and no distracting flavour.

 

For the record, this kind of is exactly what I was hoping would go away if GW had decided to split Narrative and Matched further apart, letting the games exist independently from each other, so that everyone can have the game that they want, rather than being unsatisfied with a game that doesn't meet either of their needs (or as the case is imo likely to be, only meets one of their needs)

Edited 8 hours ago by ThaneOfTas

[Dark Shepherd]

9 hours ago, SvenIronhand said:

Judging from the shot in the article, it has an Assault Cannon and pylon-mounted rockets for AT work.

Looks like rockets, multi melta, onslaught gatling cannon, and 2 melta guns

[Antarius]

First off, let me say that there is a lot of complaining in this hobby and there always has been. I don't think we'll ever get to a place where we're not near-constantyl complaining about something. Part of that is probably just human nature, part of it is the culture that's grown up around this hobby, part of it is some people getting a kick out of complaining, part of it is absolutely reasonable complaints and there are probably more things going on too.
This is just to say that I absolutely think a lot of us ought to play more and complain less (and houserule or otherwise fix the things we don't like; your hobby should make you happy!), but I also know that complaining is just a fact of hobby life (ironically, it's one that I complain a lot about) and that I think we'll never have a game that pleases everyone.

 

With that out of the way, I concede that lots of people who complain about the current state of the game aren't actually playing it a whole lot, but at the same time, the people who insist that a strong competitively balanced base game is better for everyone clearly haven't actually tried playing a lot of narrative games either. I understand the appeal of the idea because it sounds right and it would be nice if it was true "a balanced game is better for everybody, right?", but it isn't. Because the thing is, balance does not exist in a vacuum and if you balance around standing-on-circles-deathmatch it's not actually balanced for anybody who wants to do something else.
 

That's not to say that no effort should be made at balancing or that you can't have some sort of "general balance", but the approach the game designers take towards balance absolutely matters and anybody saying differently are quite simply missing a crucial and fundamental point about game design.

Edited 7 hours ago by Antarius

[ThaneOfTas]

33 minutes ago, Antarius said:

strong competitively balanced base game is better for everyone

Just on this idea that I keep seeing spread around. It's also only true if you ignore the steps taken to achieve that balance. Flattening and simplifying rules to easily quantifiable and thus balancable buffs and nerfs is an example. Things like removing the ability to choose what psychic powers that your Psyker can take, as well as reducing most of them to a spicy plasma pistol, was done in the name of balance, and it was to the detriment of the games flavour. Flattening Combi-weapons to a single profile, was done to make them easier to balance.

 

Every cool power or ability that has been turned into a +1 or -1 is an example of being made easier to balance. And all of that has made the game less immersive and less interesting to this narrative player at least.

 

I don't begrudge the existence of a competitive focused game mode that caters to the tournament crowd. I simply begrudge that it doesn't exist alongside a roleplay and narrative focused game mode that can flourish without having to be continuous simplified and cut down in the name of balance.

Edited 7 hours ago by ThaneOfTas

[Antarius]

On another, but related note, I really like how objectives are moving to terrain features rather than circles. This seems much more like the thing "real" (as real as it gets in 40K anyway) armies would fight over and if nothing else it will definitely make the game look a lot better. I also see it making terrain more important again, which is something I always tend to like.

[Matcap86]

57 minutes ago, ThaneOfTas said:

 

I don't begrudge the existence of a competitive focused game mode that caters to the tournament crowd. I simply begrudge that it doesn't exist alongside a roleplay and narrative focused game mode that can flourish without having to be continuous simplified and cut down in the name of balance.

 

The fluff, style and looks are what made Warhammer great. It forgets that to its detriment.

[Karhedron]

45 minutes ago, Matcap86 said:

The fluff, style and looks are what made Warhammer great. It forgets that to its detriment.

 

It is a shame that so much lore is in BL novels now. Codices only give the broadest of outlines of the factions' lore.

[Mogger351]

1 hour ago, Antarius said:

On another, but related note, I really like how objectives are moving to terrain features rather than circles. This seems much more like the thing "real" (as real as it gets in 40K anyway) armies would fight over and if nothing else it will definitely make the game look a lot better. I also see it making terrain more important again, which is something I always tend to like.

I actually can't agree. It's functionally shifted from "here's a circle to stand on" to "here's a rectangle to stand on".

 

If they stated the current objectives must be placed inside a terrain feature then its the same net outcome.

 

To add to this, if it is just a card shape as shown, then they'll be one of 3 outcomes:

 

1. "stand in the L shaped ruin" 

2. Here's a random ass bespoke terrain piece we made for the objective, btw sorry your 40mm base minis dont fit inside

3. Prescribed terrain profiles sold by GW at £80 a box

 

None of those fill me with much joy