Haha, I figured. I try to keep my head under the sand on the "politics" side of the hobby, this was just popping up everywhere I looked for a month solid. I do like Honest Wargamer for stats and predictions on future releases, but they mostly do vids and less on the article side of life.
Just thought I'd throw this out here, in case people still think Seraphon are OP Of course that will probably change when the new book comes out.
seraphon are very rarely OP. what we are is anti Meta and people don't know/like playing againsed anti meta. that means even if we are bad(see the last year or so of our first ed book) people will hate us. you have to have a game plan when fighting lizards and most people are very casual about AoS, you don't see top players complaining about us and thats because they know what they are doing.
The goal isn't to win its to make the other player say fuck you. That cathartic sense of victory is all we need
I played my first tournament over the last two weekends. 1000p on a little but small tabels. Oponents on the 2nd weekend ("finals") 1. Skaven clans moulder list 2. Tzeench with 3 heroes an 20 pinks 3. KO 2 boats 3 heroes some thunderer, some arcanauts Was playing - Army Faction: Seraphon - Army Type: Coalesced - Subfaction: Thunder Lizard LEADERS Engine of the Gods (300) - General - Command Traits: Prime Warbeast - Artefacts of Power: Fusil of Conflagration - Mount Traits: Beastmaster - Prayers: Heal Slann Starmaster (290) - Artefacts of Power: Itxi Grubs - Spells: Celestial Apotheosis - Aspects of the Champion: Tunnel Master Knight-Vexillor (120) - Meteoric Standard BATTLELINE Saurus Knights (110) Saurus Knights (110) ENDLESS SPELLS & INVOCATIONS 1 x Ravenak's Gnashing Jaws (70) CORE BATTALIONS *Warlord TOTAL POINTS: 1000/1000 Even before any of the games began all oponents started to complain how overpowered seraphon are. So in the first game i didn't use the realshaper and knight vexilor ability, got doubleturned from 1 into 2. Made a mistake pulling casualties wich allowed the skaven player to get 4 ratogor into the slan. Lost but was a close game. 2nd game. Same story of complaining. This time i decided i wont hear it killed all 3 heroes in turn one. Then on turn 2 rolled trippel 6 with the engine and wiped out 94 wounds of horrors. 3rd game oponents warned him about the mw he still delpoyed both boats close to one terrain and within 12" of each other took first turn killed the navigator arkonauts and chemist. Admiral survived with 3 wounds. He got the doubleturn i had one knight alive so he coudn't shoot the slaan. Also he picked the single knight to kill with his general. A cheeky redeploy with the engine made it so he had to pull the engine into combat. Killed his frigate on his turn then he concided. I am kind of torn from this tournament. My List did what I wanted it to do. Kill all the small footheroes fast. I got a lot of complaining and this made the day sour for me. I actually had not much fun. Especially the tzeench player, (we also played on the first weekend and she won by 1 point after round 2. Where she had 20 blues and one hero standing and I had lost only 2 knights. Ran out of time) was saying she doesn't like uniteractive things. Asked her why she is then playing the grandstrat to have at least 9 eyes on the destiny dice (scores it without having a single model on the battlefield). Answere because she wants to win. At this point I had to walk away.
And this is why talking about OP/UP is kinda pointless when it concerns fun. Things like being anti-meta, breaking the general flow of the game, lacking interaction, or simply ruining their prefered playstyle by being a complete hard-counter are much more frustrating for opponents than an army which simply has a somewhat "OP" winrate. It also helps that top players generally have different priorities,they might even like the things that casual players find frustrating or unfair as these things tend to provide interesting challenges at a high level. People are weird....
not pointless you just shouldn't listen to people who don't know what they are talking about. ... yes control strats have been a part of basically every strategy game ever created. whether new players enjoy playing againsed it is irrelevant as it is a normal healthy part of every game. keeping power strategies in check and being the entire arm of opponent interaction is important. yes they know how to play the game.
It is a statistic that is correlated with far too many confounders, most of which are impossible to control for, and a good chunk of which aren't even particularly clear. Making it basicly impossible to base anything of value on. While some control is fine, and even needed as a counter-mechanic towards more straightforward brute force strategies, it becomes an issue when it allows you to flat out break the normal gameflow. Which can be a difficult thing to balance. In the case of AoS you have nonsense like flooding the board with skinks, and not having a single effective combat unit. Which breaks the regular gameflow, and isn't a whole lot of fun for anyone to deal with. Stuff like that isn't great. 1) There's plenty of competitive players who are absolutely terrible at the game. And 2) no, it's quite literally because at a fundamental level they prioritize different things and approach the game from a very different point of view. Which results in them viewing certain mechanics differently. For example, competitive minded players tend to adore convoluted movement & position based sheninigans (in pretty much all games with competitive scenes), whereas non-competitive players tend to find those kind of mechanics quickly start to introduce a bunch of micromanagement that takes away from the game they actually came here to play. Of course it's fine if you like that kinda stuff, but it's important to realize that competitive players are their own seperate little type of player, with priorities and wishes that differ from non-competitive players.
nice word salid. let me fix it for you. "i don't think win rates are a valuable statistic" there you go much more in line with your veiws and now people can read it. define " normal game flow". if all it takes is mass chaff to make your entire army un effective for an entire game then you have more to worry about then "normal game flow" granted right they know how to play the game. then this is probably not the game for them since a large chunk of doing well in ... well any game with movement in it is positioning. right they are people who understand the game and care enough about it to get better at it.
All of those are perfectly normal english words.... But if you want it without any statistical terms: The information that winrate contains is affected by so many different factors, both directly and indirectly, that it's impossible to attach any meaning to it. I was talking in broad terms here to make the point that a good game relies on a solid core, which creates a certain flow that occurs consistently in every game and provides rules that everyone needs to obey. While there is some wiggle room for exceptions and special rules, if you mess too much with that core it generally ends up frustrating players because that tends to feel like the exception is allowed to cheat (e.g. teleport mechanics are a great example of something that can frustrate players easily because they break the normal flow of movement) In the case of AoS, the core is mostly supposed to be described in the GHB & core book. It results in a fundamentally different game compared playing against a "normal" army which has a healthy balance of different troop types/roles. And it changes it the game so much that it no longer is fun. Which is the point I was trying to make. That regardless of this strategy being effective or not, it is simply not considered fun to play against due to how it changes the game. Again, skill, care and understanding have nothing to do with being a competitive player or not. The only point I'm trying to make is that competitive players fundamentally want different things from their games compared to other types of players. Competitive players care more about things like complexity, challenges, and skill expression. Other types of players may priorities things like powerfantasies, thematicly coherent play, playing with their favorites, cinematic/interesting gameplay, and many other aspects depending on the type of game and type of player.
I never felt we were too strong even at the end of 2nd when everyone was saying we were. I always felt we had a good balanced book in a sea of quite frankly badly written books. Recent releases have been a lot better in quality of rules and abilities and the other factions have come up to where they should have been. Unfortunately 2 year worth of nerfs have driven us down to below average. If we had not been nerfed, I feel we would be equal to the other books in their current states.
entirely untrue. it is the biggest most effective measurement of power available to us and is used by EVER competitive game for balancing. just because you think it's bad doesn't mean it is. ok define AoSs "normal game flow" and how basic things like screens and unbinding ruin it. ah so we don't break normal game flow since every thing we do(bar teleporting/summoning but thats not the anti meta things we do and aren't very good) is in the core rules we have a balanced troop type with a good coverage of different play styles and good hero representation. even full skinks builds usually bring monsters and utility units. in what way. you have yet to establish how we play the game differently. the anti meta stuff that make us strong are 1 good wizards that let us unbind (no the map wide unbind doesn't matter) 2. star venom giving us solid and flexible anti armor play. and 3. very good assassination options. all of the above are completely normal things that every army can and does do we just do all of then at the expense of most every thing else. yes they do. they care more about the game yes. they care enough about it to learn how to play well and to get better at it. then narrative is right there for those people, we don't have to balance the competitive side of the game around people who don't want to play competitively.
Everyone uses it because it's the easiest statistic to measure, and it's understandable by people who know nothing about statistics, additionally, it intuitively looks like a 50% winrate should be "healthy", so it's easy to get people to agree that this should be the end-goal. It's a nice easy to understand number. And it is nice and easy to understand because it's a gross oversimplification of an incredibly complex system... And since 99% of people arguing on forums about this subject aren't expert statisticians, they never realize just how much of an oversimplification it is. Unfortunately it also means that trying to convince people that it's a bad statistic to use is rather hard. First giving people a crashcourse in statistics isn't exactly viable on a forum. Yeah, I give up. If this is the basic stance you're going to approach this discussion from then the entire thing is pointless. You can't just view them in a vacuum as completely separate sides, the different aspects influence each other. Nor can you claim that competitive players care "more" or any of that nonsense. It'd be such a wonderfull world if competitive players realized that competition isn't the only aspect of designing a good game.
probably because it IS a useful and readily exesable metric that DOES give a good example of how strong a thing is. it's why usage rates and win rates are the main two metrics used by most game developers when balancing a game. as opposed to using what? we have been asking you for years for a objective alternative but you never present one. again feel free to provide a alternative that is both measurable, easily available, and more useful. they are separate sides, they are treated as such by pretty much every one. of course i can. it's true of ANY competitive game you HAVE to care more about a game to invest the hours necessary to study and learn a game well enough to play it well. this is true about chess this is true about card games it's true about video games and it's true about wargames. as opposed to what? listening to the people who play maybe once ever 1-3 months and regularly forget basic game rules? i do not value the opinions of people who don't understand a thing. if the rules of the game bother a person so much they can use the non competitive version of the game and play narrative.
I'll just say that with the highest winrate being 60% and the lowest being 44%, I do think that 3rd Edition is turning out to be better balanced than 2nd, even if I still don't enjoy the core rules as much, lol! And so far they seem to have done a better job of balancing the 3e books.(except Tzeentch and Lumineth still having way too many good units + OP abilities) So hopefully our 3e book is in the same boat, good without being blatantly OP.
Dude, as long as you refuse to accept that the only difference between a competitive player and non-competitive player is how they approach the game, that both sides have important insights, and that it says absolutely nothing about skill, knowledge, understanding, or dedication to the game, this entire discussion is pointless. Useage rates are slightly more informative, or well, it's a lot easier to check for confounders making it possible to determine if an outlier is actually caused by a problem. Still not terribly informative if you don't check for confounders though. And no, it's the two metrics developers publish, because they're easy to talk about. It's a lot easier to say "look, this metric is high, so we nerfed it" as opposed to to publishing a 20 page essay with various charts and graphs to explain why something was nerfed by 1%, not because they contain a whole lot of usefull information. It started as basic PR to keep the forums under control, especially when it's a nerf to a popular thing. And unfortunately after decades of this nonsense they painted themselves into a corner and have conditioned the competitive gamers into believing it's actually important to have this metric within an arbitrary window completely ignoring valid reasons why a particular unit/faction/ability/whatever might naturally be an outlier on this metric. Internally any halfway capable studio will be using metrics like average damage output, maximum output, minimum output, damage profile, how much do these values differ from the standard for this particular unit-type, idem for defensive capabilities, mobility, flexibility, how much does this unit/faction/ability break established rules (e.g. ignoring LoS, Crowd-control, teleporting, insta-kill mechanics, going invulnerable, anything that is a special rule really) and so on and so on. 1) I've repeatedly given you examples of various measures, rules, and indications, good designers use to determine if something fits in their game. 2) A catch-all measure that "objectively" measures all possible design issues across all possible games for all possible audiences doesn't exist because a great deal of design issues aren't mathematical in nature. Not to mention you'll quickly find they are in a gray area where it's a matter of personal preference, and one type of player will accept it while another will not (e.g. an aggresive player will call powerfull defenses OP, a defensive player will cry foul if an enemy can crush their defenses. Which one is right depends on what kind of playstyle the designers want to accentuate.).
Well, I'll fully admit that I've not played enough competitively to call myself a competitive player, having only been to a couple small local tournaments. I'm not sure I'd even call myself a good player in general. I'd say I'm at least a pretty good Seraphon player, but I certainly don't know all the ins and outs of other armies and can't remember all their strategies and abilities enough to be able to play well against all of them. As somewhat of an outsider to the purely competitive scene, it appears to me that the game is balanced around competitive play. I do think that army usage rates should be factored in though. We know for example that a really popular army can have a much lower winrate despite being strong simply due to the number of less experienced players running that army. While an army with objectively weaker rules can have a higher winrate if the fewer people playing that army are really, really good at it. I think Gitz is a primary example. Most people who are good at the game won't have much trouble beating Gitz. But the players who aren't as experienced will be surprised when facing a good Gitz player. So to my point of view winrate can be somewhat misleading but it's still an important metric to look at. If an army is popular and has a consistently high winrate (looking at you, Tzeentch!) then it's pretty safe to say that army is probably a bit OP. If an army is consistently below average or at the bottom then you can reasonably assume that army is probably lacking in some ways.
not going to except what isn't true, competitive players regularly put hundreds if not thousands of hours more into a thing they study it they practice it they CARE more about it. yes the way they approach the game is one of the differences between the groups but no just because you occasionally play the game does not mean you have just as much insight as someone who taken the time and has put the effort in to understand the game and get good at it. so you say. ooooor it's not some weird conspiracy and they use it because it IS useful. frost frog uses it Blizzard uses it Konomi uses it Nintendo use it valve used to use it back when they still made games ect. ect. ect. many times we DO have the nitty gritty for why they balance a thing and often the reason the nerf a thing IS just that it was winning too much. um yes there are all variables that can be tweaked to balance a unit but they are not a indicator of whether or not a thing is balanced such as? well yeah but thats not what i asked for. i asked for a measurable readily available and better then win rates method to judge balance. im still waiting on your answer. hence the need for a objective standard. just because you think something is unfair doesn't mean it is so we need a way to determent when balance is off so we can fix it. no which one is right is based on how well both strategies work. we need a way to tell what is and is not successful there for... win rates.