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Post by gobber on Apr 27, 2018 1:57:25 GMT
If I ever quit warmahordes 40k would not be the one to pick up the scraps...
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Post by Aegis on Apr 27, 2018 2:14:29 GMT
Look man, if you don't like CID that's fine, you're free to not participate or leave the game or whatever you want to do. But this declaration that "back in the day" PP put out better balance than they do now is some extremely rose-tinted glasses crap, and saying that public playtesting means the developers are bad at their jobs is simple ignorance of how gaming works in 2018. I don't dislike CID per se. I think CID it's better than leaving the game in the hands of these developers, but I still consider it an admission of failure from them, and I dislike the use they do to CID. The whole videogame comparison is wrong. A video game has thousand times more things to test than a miniature game (and I talk as professional software developer and tester). For some tests (like server stabilities or performance with high amount of users) a huge amount of testers is even mandatory. You can't test in-house if a program or game will break or become too slow. You don't have thousands of internal playtesters. Bugs are also a lot more difficult to find than miniature interactions where the interactions are fairly limited. Tabletop games industry was never like that. Do you know any other miniature game that does something like CID? But there still are a lot of interesting an well balanced games around. Why they can do it and PP can't? You can be a fanboy as much as you want, and I understand the feeling. Everyone of us invested a lot of money and time purchasing, painting and studying the rules. We are all attached to the game, and so we all want it to be great and get more and more players every day. That doesn't change that the developers are doing wrong decisions after wrong decisions. I can't count how many totally stupid things they did since MK3 started, and I'm not even talking about just too powerful models, but also pretty silly decisions, easily avoidable, that any professional developer should be able to spot on sight. If you don't trust MY judice on that, than trust THEM... They said that they playtested the trencher JR warcaster with Snipe, and then removed it after a day because it was too OP... Guess what? Few months after they propose another JR, with much more personal contribution than the Trencher JR, and they give him Snipe... Doesn't sound silly and incoherent? They removed in the translation from MK2 to MK3 all feats that made modes invulnerable because it was bad for the game... Guess what? Few months after they release Una2... They said that Stormlances were fine and into the curve at the top of their OPness, when Cygnar was rocking the world with Storm Division, but then they nerfed them when the meta had already shifted to make them less dominant. They removed almost any form of upkeep removal from the game (except to few Menoth casters), because widespread upkeep removal was bad for the game and made upkeep casters useless... And then they proposed Eilish with easy upkeep removal and being availible to all factions (also pissing on the lore just to make a good NQP launch... I'm still laughing at the human mage in Retribution). They clearly understood that the original Journeyman warcaster was a bad concept, since giving buffs outside the battlegroup to a JR made it an auto-include, and one that doesn't really want to bring a jack along. So with the new editions they forced JRs to take a jack, and made all the subsequent JRs all having only BG groups to avoid buffs on a stick.... Than guess what? They make 4 buffs on a stick just to celebrate an anniversary... I still have to understand what the hell were they thinking when they nerfed Haley1 reducing the SPD debuff to 8" (an automatic suicide, since at 8 you can still charge my caster with the debuff, so it was totally useless). How could they release a change like that? Did they never put it on a table? That debuff hasn't a single reason in the world to be useful, why putting it like that? Resuming, they did TONS of huge, stupid and clear mistakes, mistakes that everyone not having the pink glasses has recognized on sight, and mistakes that go against what THEY THEMSELVES have told us about the game balance few months before. Sure, in MK2 there were OP models like Gaspy and Haley2, but the game in general was a lot more balanced than now. It was recognized as one of the best balanced games around, and without any help from the community. Some models were abusive, yes, but overall the effective faction balance was quite fine. If you looked at the old tourney reults, most factions were around 45%-55% win percentages. Only in MK3 we had things like Cryx having results like 72% wins, and while CID continues to nerf the outliers, new outliers continue to spawn and now we are in a constant change state, that often borders in the "the last that got CID is in the best place" that reminds me a lot of old GW codex balance... If there is someone with the pink glasses here, are the ones that don't even understand the logic fallacy of the devs decisions... If you think the devs are right in what they do, how do you explain when they state something, and than do the opposite few months after? They either were wrong before or after. guys like Ganso that are always from the dev side since the start of this forum how can continue to always say that all decisions were right? You can all live in the illusion that everything is great, but it isn't. Metas are becoming smaller and disappearing every day. We have a lot less players now at turnaments than during MK2. I agree that MK3 introduced many good things, but they also introducing a lot more that are making players run away, and while I agree that CID puts a limit on the biggest outliers avoiding the game breaking that was happening in the first months of MK3 (They did CID for a reason, that wasn't really "let the community partecipate", they never needed to let us partecipate before, the real reson was that they were getting awful results and awful feedbacks from the community after doing things like Una2, Karchev and Haley1, so they surrendered and did let the community fix the stupid errors of the devs, errors that would still be happening, like Elish or Snipe to Cygnar, if CID wasn't there), the game is slowly falling down, and until PP does something radical about their developing process (or team), it will only get worse.
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Post by The Snark Knight on Apr 27, 2018 2:28:47 GMT
But there still are a lot of interesting and well balanced games around. Why they can do it and PP can't? This is what I'm curious about. I've always felt like Warmachine is pretty well-balanced compared to most other games out there. Well, aside from Guild Ball, which has got about two dozen models in it.
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Post by Aegis on Apr 27, 2018 2:43:09 GMT
But there still are a lot of interesting and well balanced games around. Why they can do it and PP can't? This is what I'm curious about. I've always felt like Warmachine felt pretty well-balanced compared to most other games out there. Well, aside from Guild Ball, which has got about two dozen models in it. Guild Ball is well balanced because it's done by the old MK2 PP developers, the ones that didn't need CID to understand that Snipe in Cygnar was a bad idea... Malifaux and Infinity are also quite fine on balance (or at least they were, I don't play those since a bit so I'm not updated). You are right, Warmachine was renown for being one of the best balanced games around. It was one of its main attracting factors, having generically worse miniatures than the competitors, but a very solid ruleset, based on skill a lot more than luck. MK3 isn't yet particulary bad. I agree that in some things is even more balanced than MK2 (expecially the main rules), but a stream of bad decisions by the devs is slowly making it less and less solid. They were wrecking the game at the beginning of MK3, making most players run away, so they did CID, that actually works on avoiding game-breaking combos, but still there is a limit on how much the community can do. If the general decisions are bad in the long run (like those 4 new casters), the game can't help but slowly fall.
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Post by The Snark Knight on Apr 27, 2018 2:49:37 GMT
True, I've heard nothing but good things about Infinity. It's been a long while since I've tooled around with Malifaux, but last I checked Resurrectionists were broke as a joke.
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Post by HubertJFarnsworth on Apr 27, 2018 3:05:44 GMT
Look man, I'm not gonna keep going point for point with you.
I will point out that at no point have I claimed the devs are perfect and never make mistakes. Like all of us they are human and have made plenty of mistakes. The MkIII launch was so uneven and weird that I broke from the game for about six months and just played Dropzone and Dropfleet for a while.
That said, your insistance that MkII's balance was better than it is today is pretty unsupported by evidence, and the fact remains that modern game design makes copious use of player feedback which is entirely a good thing. You complain that the game isn't as balanced as other games with a fraction of the total model and rule count, including previous versions of this game and games with a total model count smaller than any single faction of Warmachine. You seem to be under the impression that additional models don't make balancing the game harder, while also complaining that the devs don't know what they're doing because they introduce models you think will make balancing the game harder.
And look, I'm not even here to convince you because you've clearly made up your mind and just want to vent. I'm here so that when a new player does stumble on this forum and starts looking at the general board it's not just a bunch of people complaining that "the game is bad, why aren't there new players!?"
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Post by Aegis on Apr 27, 2018 3:39:49 GMT
The evidences I bought were the win percentages of factions at tourneys, and if you have the time to find the old data (now more difficult since PP burned their official forum, another bad decision by the way...) you would see it. Only in MK3 we had factions winning more than 7 games out of ten (and often losing the other 3 mostly on mirrors). That said, neither that comparison or the comparison to other games (Infinity has quite a lot of models and it's still balanced without CID) or even the discussion about if CID is good or bad are my main point (actually, I said many time that I'm glad CID is there keeping things toghether). My main point is that I'm pissed off to see clearly bad decisions made by professional developers, and with bad decisions I don't mean the normal imperfections that every game has, but things so clearly bad that even random players notice to being bullshit at first sight, and still professional developers either put and defend for weeks in CID, or even directly bring out as finished rules. I mean things that contraddict what even the devs themselves said few weeks before, showing clearly that they don't know what they are doing. One last example is the new rule of NQP 4 for Company of Iron that says that models costing 10+ points activate twice per turn... How can a professional developer not realize that a rule like that is totally unbalanced? How can being fine that a model costing 10 points can do double the work of a model costing 9 (so supposed to have a very similar value and output?). How can they not realize that letting you activate a beast or jack two times in a row, with just one single (likely warrior) model activation from the opponent to stop it, is bad in a game where if I flip the right objective I can win the game directly? Those are the kind of silly decisions that the devs continue to make, month after month, that while still haven't managed to break the game in a single blow, are slowly mining its fundations (let not me even begin on free solos in theme forces, a thing that practically just stealth raised the standard size of games, since everyone plays with 10-15 free points, and made the point cost of solos totally irrilevant, since everything now gets taken for free, so removing the main balancing factor of the game). I don't complain that there are not new players. I know why it's happening (partially thanks to the silly decisions of disbanding Press Gangers, partially thanks to the forum closure, and partially thanks to all other silly decisions of the devs), so the best I can do is to hope that something changes (and maybe pointing out the problems can help getting people to work on a solution). That, and doing my part with the newbies in my personal meta, a thing that I do since years. Just saying that Everything is awesome(™) does not help the newbies. If a player arrives to online forums, likely has already bought at lest the starter. If he does, his meta and the game in general will decide if he remains or not, not a random post in a forum.
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Post by W0lfBane on Apr 27, 2018 3:59:48 GMT
If I ever quit warmahordes 40k would not be the one to pick up the scraps... Dude any fantasy flight miniature game is a lost cause except for x wing
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Cyel
Junior Strategist
Posts: 685
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Post by Cyel on Apr 27, 2018 5:07:54 GMT
40ks balance used to be "whoever has the newest release has the best stuff". It's always been much more random than that. GW just was oblivious of how strong/weak things they design really are, no matter how new they were. Sometimes entire new factions were rubbish on their first release, like Ogre Kingdoms. New armybook/codexes most often contained a mix of OP and crappy brand new releases - like for example the release of wh40k Chaos Heldrake accompanied by the, equally new, ground daemon engine nobody even remebers the name of . GW never really showed with any consistency that they were intentionally trying to push new models with OP rules. More that they had no clue whatsoever.
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snoozer
Junior Strategist
Posts: 467
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Post by snoozer on Apr 27, 2018 6:18:59 GMT
You could also say that mkII had a very bad balance as you would always see the same lists over and over again, even with the same casters. If people like the Arcane Assist guys say that the MKIII has the best balance (not perfekt) of Warmachine so far, I do agree with them. While 40k Players Don't get that their game is broken, the gloom and doom that you find in Forums about PP is out of proportion. How many over the top casters are actually still there? Just enjoy the game a bit, get table time and see that not everything is bad. Or do something else for a while. There are many small games out there with a low model investment. They also have a good balance because there is not nearly as many models as im WmH. And in a few weeks after their release, we can see how little influence the 0-Jrs will have.
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Post by 36cygnar24guy36 on Apr 27, 2018 6:33:36 GMT
Ok, time for real talk, have you tried putting Haley 1 behind a Centurion?
Gang and Flank are working as intended.
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Post by oncomingstorm on Apr 27, 2018 7:43:28 GMT
I don't complain that there are not new players. I know why it's happening (partially thanks to the silly decisions of disbanding Press Gangers, partially thanks to the forum closure, and partially thanks to all other silly decisions of the devs) Oh? You think rants like yours don't add to the problem? I see the Global Moderator Tag under your name. Did you really make this forum just to Rage at the Heavens like some sort of scorned lover that can't shut up about an ex? Or do you actually give a Firetruck about the game and its community and would like to keep it positive and optimistic? I know perfectly well what side of the aisle I stand. I knew when I got the black 5 years ago. Calling me a fanboy does not jade me. I just spent 4 days playing WM/H and running Scrambles at Kingdom Con, it had the best turn out in years. People that are actually playing the game are enjoying it greatly. Frankly you should be glad there are voices like Farnsworth trying to be positive here. Unless of course, you are happy with being Global Moderator of a toxic cesspool. Realism is not the same as pessimism. Being positive does not necessarily entail being blind to the flaws of the game (or the concerning trends from some of the developers). And calling out those flaws is not the same as toxicity. Personally, I think there is at least one dev who is utterly out of touch with the game's balance. I don't think I've seen one post from them on the CID forums that I did not virulently disagree with, and as far as I can tell, they're very often the driving force behind much of the crap that gets dredged through week one CID. There may or may not be others, but on a team that small, it's concerning when even one Dev seems completely out of touch with the game. Also personally, I love the shit out of this game, and I don't foresee leaving it anytime soon. I've got nearly a full faction of Circle and Ret, so the cost for me to keep playing is very low. But I would never even consider encouraging a new player to start the game without being very clear about the state the game is in (fairly constant flux, with - necessary - nerfs to game breaking models coming down the pipe every 3 months or so), as well as the current state of certain factions. I couldn't conscience getting someone to spend a ton of money (and it is a ton of money) on a game like WMH without being very clear about it's flaws. Note that I am not saying that I agree with Aegis. I don't think that the game is dying. My meta lost about half it's players at the start of mk3 (just about all the hordes players, shockingly), but we've picked up enough replacements to more than make up for it (the neighbouring big city meta is close to dead, though). However, I don't see a ton of difference between their negativity and others' blind positivity. IMO fanboys are every bit as toxic as overly negative people.
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Post by 36cygnar24guy36 on Apr 27, 2018 8:15:24 GMT
Personally, I think there is at least one dev who is utterly out of touch with the game's balance. I don't think I've seen one post from them on the CID forums that I did not virulently disagree with, and as far as I can tell, they're very often the driving force behind much of the crap that gets dredged through week one CID. There may or may not be others, but on a team that small, it's concerning when even one Dev seems completely out of touch with the game. Does their name rhyme with 'Mason Bowls' per chance?
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Post by 36cygnar24guy36 on Apr 27, 2018 8:32:28 GMT
To be honest I think the biggest threat to Warmachine and Hordes is not that the game is becoming more/less balanced, it is that the barrier to entry is so high. Not only from a learning curve point of view (it's not so much a curve but a sheer cliff), but from a financial point of view, a new player has to drop a lot of money to get enough models to build a 75 point theme force, and those models then have no overlap with any other theme force almost, so if they want two lists that are different themes they have to drop a whole bunch more money.
Other games like 40k and Age of Sigmar, for all their faults game play and balance wise, are a lot easier to get into, whenever I play at my FLGS there is always tons of GW games being played.
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Post by oncomingstorm on Apr 27, 2018 8:52:26 GMT
Personally, I think there is at least one dev who is utterly out of touch with the game's balance. I don't think I've seen one post from them on the CID forums that I did not virulently disagree with, and as far as I can tell, they're very often the driving force behind much of the crap that gets dredged through week one CID. There may or may not be others, but on a team that small, it's concerning when even one Dev seems completely out of touch with the game. Does their name rhyme with 'Mason Bowls' per chance? I will neither confirm nor deny that this is the case.
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