GW News: magic and prayers in #NewAoS

King Brodd is not the only Mega-Gargant on his way.



Oi, it's cheswday, innit?



Quite an impressive weapon too:

 

Speaking of originality, look what I came across in my 8th edition WoC army book...



So that's where that AoS army name comes from

 

Well actually both ultimately stem from the Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition book Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness:


But yes, the AoS 'Slaves to Darkness' name can still trace its origins to Warhammer Fantasy.

 

Nice find! That's some serious old school stuff!

 

So apparently the new space dwarfs are so ridiculously OP GW actually apologizes.
That's new.

 

Probably because they're Dwarfs and GW doesn't want them being so strong... if they were Elves GW would make no such apology...

In all seriousness, it's good that they are making free amendments to sort out the biggest balance issues. It's a pity, though, that they've only just started doing this in their long history of games development...

 

I really dislike this constant update feature, but I'm not in it at all.

Does it help?

Anyone?

 

Now if only they could fix their mistakes before printing the codex so it isn't an expansive paperweight within a couple of weeks

 

Yes indeed. If they went back to making their books in the UK none of this would be an issue, because they wouldn't need to send their books off to print so early after developing them in order to achieve their planned release schedule, and could spend more time playtesting and checking their rules before sending them to print to assess their power level and amend any balance issues.

I certainly think the amount of savings they'd lose by sending their books to cheap Chinese workhouses would definitely be offset by the increased popularity of (and thus increased revenue from) their rules as a result of the improved games design if they did what is suggested above. Not to mention that they would be contributing to the British economy rather than that of Communist China.

 

Honestly, the main issue is the awefull release schedule & rates at which they put out new releases. Moving the production back to the UK (or just the EU) wouldn't change that much.

They're acting as it's a shallow live service videogame that needs major seasonal, or at least yearly, updates to keep the playerbase from leaving for the next shiny thing.

But board-games aren't really like that, especially not when there's also a large collector's aspect to the game. They have much more stable playerbases that won't immeadiatly jump ship. So there's really no need for the breakneck speed at which they go through editions and new factions. Spread it out a little bit, playtest more. The playerbase is more than happy to wait for it.

 

Agreed, I certainly preferred the 4-year gap between Editions that the 'Old' GW had - it felt as though there was time for the Edition to breathe and the bi-monthly release of a new book meant there was plenty of time to playtest it and check for balance. The problem with the 'Old' GW was that they didn't release FAQ or balance update PDFs very often, something the 'new' GW has at least managed to fix.

If we had the slower release schedules of the 'old' GW and the community interaction and regular balance PDFs of the 'new' one, we'd actually be getting somewhere near a decent level of games development from GW

 

That is an interesting idea, but ultimately from a business standpoint (not a hobby one), I don't think it would hold true.

• most people don't buy into GW games for balance, but rather they are buying into the lore/setting, the player base (what their friends are playing), the model range and support (stores, online, availability, etc.)
• the cost savings to print in China are probably significant
• there is no evidence that poor balance actually hurts sales, powercreep may actually be beneficial
• a game like 40k is nearly impossible to balance anyways

 

True, perfect balance isn't possible. But it's also not needed. Honestly, all that's really needed is just to prevent degenerate gameplay from popping up. Prevent unit-spam, prevent stuff like ward-save spam, prevent weird daisy-chaining nonsense, prevent units/factions from breaking the core gameplay (e.g. "weird" armies like knights/SoB probably shouldn't exist). That sorta stuff.

However, it's honestly fine if a faction has a high winrate. If only because you can't balance around a faction being easier to play, or a faction being particularly popular, and how that will inevitably skew your "objective" balance statistics.

What's interesting is the difference in balancing appraoch between 40k (or AoS) and for example, bloodbowl.

In 40K they focus heavily on "objective" measures of balance, and religiously gather statistics. They also try to keep everyone at (roughly) the same level of power.

In bloodbowl they flat out state that some teams are terrible. If you play with them you handicap yourself. Instead they focus on making the teams fun and interesting to play with. You're probably not going to win a tournament with the weaker teams, but they provide an interesting and different challenge.

Weirdly enough, I don't think I've ever heared anyone complain about a bloodbowl release. Whereas every other major 40K/AoS release causes the internet to be flooded with posts about how the new faction is the FoTM who dominates the meta.

And that seems to hold more generally for games. Games that accept that not everything will be the same powerlevel, but focus first and foremost on everything being fun, tend to feel more fair & importantly more fun as they naturally avoid degenerate (and degenrate-like) gameplay. Whereas games that are explicitly designing around a "healthy" competitive meta seem to fairly consistently run into issues where degenerate (or degenerate-like) gameplay keeps sneaking its way into the game.

 

I'm not saying that it can't be improved, merely that it won't provide GW with the financial windfall that was being suggested.