 Hello everybody. If it's Wednesday, it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly Joining us as always is my co-host Tom. What's up, buddy? Well friends, how are you? Yeah, I hope everyone's doing well Sadly, we are not joined by the one and only Owen Jackson tonight, but don't worry. We will have him back By the way, everybody should keep bothering him in every place way and area where you can find him It's amazingly funny and I heard he loves it. So that's great Loves it We're looking forward to the t-shirt. I hope everybody is ready for some hot PowerPoint action tonight Oh, it's gonna be so hot the hottest of PowerPoints So get ready for that as we talk about NPE and negative play experience a lot of fun stuff we found in the survey I am really really excited about this one honestly I think I sent it to you earlier Tom so you could you know give up or have it open on a side screen or whatever since that besides there's a delay for you looking at it, but Yeah, we're it's we're gonna get into it. Okay at any rate though first of course news So rumor engines and stuff it's up. What is this nonsense Tom? What is this? What is this collection of jangles that we've got here? You know, it's a great question, right? I think that it's I think it's dwarfy Okay, I Don't but I think it's a photoshopped picture because I think they took a picture of it and photoshopped out something underneath all this Bajangles As they have been wanted to do from time to time So this is what I'm gonna say is that I look at The little crescent moon Bajangles sure. Yeah. Yeah, are you speaking about like these little hooky hooks on the side Are you talking about down here this this hanging jangle? Like so I don't I can't see what you're yeah, I understand The so in the bottom shield. Yes panel. Uh-huh. There are three little bajangles that hang out. There are indeed The top right one which looks like a little crescent moon. Sure Is like super dwarfy. Okay, like outlandishly dwarfy. Okay. Um the The the one kind of looks like a cog. Although, you know, I don't know what to make of that and the other one kind of looks like a hammer Um Is this what the dwarven players have called for? Is this the new united dwarf faction? Are they together again? Have the children of grungy and grim near or gobbledygook or whatever their Silly god's names are are they all back together? Uh, I could be see this being like a steam golem Okay, like, you know how the goal the golem faction we had talked about or like not the golem faction, but like the um, like dwarves coming out swinging with like the full on Mechie you're not like not mechanical per se, but like the enchanted Like yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So your prediction is fire slayers part two You heard it here first. Thomas planted his flag. He's saying they're officially going to expand the worst selling least popular least played army No, I think that they're going to do the exact opposite. They're going to roll them into another faction and that's how they fix them Ah, that could be I mean it doesn't make sense Like it's a good solution How do you fix wood elves? You make them part of cities and make them not wood elves Like it's a fair point. It's a fair point. Nobody's playing this on its own. What if we just lump it into something else? right and so I like and then they can then they can further spruke k.o Right. Sure. Um and and supplement it with this other line of models. I don't know. I just It like there are a number of like I've painted a lot of Dwarvey stuff sure and the bojangles like the ornation here is very similar to a lot of that now Don't believe that's a word, but that's fine. That's fine. It's distinctly different So it's not the same. I'm not saying it's the same. Yeah, I get it. You're saying it pays homage. It's reminiscent of It's in the same family Okay, okay. All right. So that's what I would say uh The yeah, somebody else in in the in a group I mentioned as well That there are some similar similarities between these little three things and the the three things that the zarina is wearing I think that's just pure coincidence. It's three round things that have rough shapes in them Like that's a pretty common iconography in warhammer in general. Nurgle has the same three Round things often with stuff in them. Like I don't think this is nerdy, right? So at any rate, uh, you know, here's what I'll say The best solution for You're not wrong. The best solution for fire slayers both fixing the army making it more interesting And stuff like that would be to Reunite it in some way Into into like a combined clans book and look Orac war clans their clans they all got together Uh, so these dwarves dwarves are have, you know, clan families or whatever. So why not same thing, right? That's Yeah, it's the same it's the same concept um I don't know Uh, what I do know is that I don't care about dwarves. So There we are If they were to combine them together, I think that would be a positive thing probably That's my thoughts. What else we got ton um I also uh, we had some new broken realms fiction and it's about somebody who you are quite partial to this I am it's about sig bald. Yeah, actually both sig bald and uh, the new big fat guy are in there and uh They have a bit of a A dust up and whatever and then uh, some kind of avatar of slanesh Basically shows up and tells them Hey, hey, hey, hey idiots stop this Uh, you need to get over to Excelsius real quick They and they say it like in some kind of Weird way that's like you need to get to the place of the gathering storm where the door in the sky with the spear Whatever it's gur and it's excelsis and all of those things have uh, like that's what it is. So It makes me wonder good So it just like feels like they're they're all roads are leading to excelsis and the gate to azir which Excelsis isn't on the gate like it isn't part of the gate to azir Like it's separate excelsis. It's just it's like Uh, excelsis is where the city of secrets or whatever it was, right? Like that's where that air was Yeah, like that's just a prophetic coast thing. That's but that's in oxhi. Like that's not in Like I don't understand what the big deal is I don't know. It's in good. That's where the story's pointing. I'm doing the same place. I'm sorry. Yes It's in girth. It's the same place where the war is currently marching. Yeah, sure But my point being that it's not it's not The entrance to azir Look everybody's going there for whatever reason everybody's going there. How about excelsis? That's fine. I'll accept that that we know for sure And they keep talking about the sky swallowing the storm or I don't know some nonsense so at any rate, uh The point is is that it's going to be a party in excelsis and You know, it's sure whatever. We'll see what happens Like exactly as as skates said get to excelsis. There's plot happening over there I mean, that's basically what the slanesh Manifestation showed up and said like hey, hey idiots. You're in the wrong place the plots over there Like they wandered off camera and and slanesh showed up and was like, hey, hey No, no over there. That's where the story is. Yeah party. So, um, it it let me tell you what tom It leads me the the fact that that was a piece of fiction leads me exactly to Renew my fear that I mentioned when we did the broken realms prediction around this, right? Yeah, my fear being destruction shows up Wallops order has a big victory and then chaos just shows up and is like her her her Thanks for weakening both of you now. We kill you both and get into whatever, you know Let you know fully get into easier or whatever and just like and chaos is the actual winner of all that How boring if that ends up being how it plays out and don't be wrong. I say that as an Unabashed devotee of slanesh, right? I still don't want to see that be the end of that story because that's so That's so tired. That's so wrote like oh, you've all played into my my clever chaos plans Again, huh? Zinches that work again. Yeah got it again. No one more time. Oh you tricky bird That sneaky chicken he is he is on So what was yeah? Yeah, I'm like I'm mixed I I hope you know, we've talked about where we think the end of broken realms is going Um, I you had mentioned skaven. Yeah Which I'm seeing is less and less likely as they're not showing up in any stories. Well, they're ninja rats. I guess Uh One of my fears or proposals was that the news getting started box was actually orcs. Do you remember that iron balls? Yeah, yeah, yeah That was one of my potential calls. Well, there's been so much talk of destruction I mean that your call feels a lot better than mine. Let me say that Yeah, uh, we'll see. I mean, I hope that it's skaven because they could use a whole revamped line Yes That said I could imagine like a great green wog Like something right sure Yeah, like a re A re-exploration of that concept and then they can push the sons of behemoth Like you can push a bunch of other things in the midst of all that Yep All right, look if the end of this road with destruction is they have some kind of actual Like narratives pathos and presence in the story great then i'm gonna call it a win Because right now they don't You know what I want them to do is just go all Converge on the all points and just have a punch up and just take it all of it over. They're like no No ocr catacross out. This is ours. Sure. No archeon out. This is ours And it basically just be turned into a big fight arena. I think that'd be great a big orky fight arena Yeah, sounds fantastic anything that means death gets destroyed. I fully support. So yeah, but my point being that like How amazing would it be if if he's just like oh go and do it easier? Hard right taken archeon citadel done Be great mine I don't think that'll happen. I'd love if it did We need more orcs in all of our lives Um But related to the slanesh story, uh, let's I'm gonna jump to the lore article on slanesh that got dropped and they said like slanesh is free Well, no a shard of like slanesh is the key in marathi's thing She like slanesh birth is birth birthes births big birth as a part of itself Out into the world That's the promethean form, but it's always been slanesh like slanesh is still in chains And slanesh is out there in in the world Okay, in this promethean, let me just say if you go rewatch that video That's what I proposed. Is that what escape was just more slanesh, right? It's all just slanesh I mean, that's what they seem to say in the article quite a ways back when they first talked about this This is two months ago now or something. It's just more like slanesh has released or escaped. There's more slanesh There's always more slanesh. Yeah, I mean, it's a cast god, right? Like its form is not Such constituted that it cannot be in multiple it can't be in multiple places at once, right? They are both one and fully the same And they are both slanesh If we get one more, we'll have a holy trinity. Maybe slanesh can have some kind of spirit or something too Well, slanesh's number is six six. Yeah Yeah, I'm I'm just making a father son and holy ghost joke. Um at any rate the uh The so yes, so, you know that portion of slanesh is out And they kind of talked about the impact of that in the return of the geld prince that is to say of the of sigval And uh, you know, I mean it didn't say much the important part about them releasing that article Was that that told me okay cool. You're going to announce the pre-order On sunday for next saturday, right? So like Calendar wise, I guess that would mean what the seventh or something. I don't whatever this sunday is I think that's right sunday sunday not not, uh Not Valentine's day Correct. Well, no the pre-order would be on the 13th, which will be valentine's weekend. Oh, oh, yeah Because it's that they do the whole sunday announcement Like we know this sunday this coming sunday is an announcement For a pre-order that will go up the next week because that'll be the two weeks next week. Yeah, yeah, yeah So this will be valentine's day. Yeah, and and so like that just makes sense Because the trick is if you miss that then the next pre-release weekend is the 27th And I just doubt where they could push all the way to the end of the month They wouldn't have started doing a lore article or they wouldn't have started an article series now if this was going to go on for Literally another month Right. Well, I mean they did that with lumeneth, but yes, I understand sure So, um, so my guess is this is purely purely guess Based on them releasing that article is that this is like we've seen them gin up this marketing like this before Right, you start with the very soft lore articles And then sunday they announced that the pre-release will be the next saturday the 13th Then we spin into like the rules preview articles Right, and then we get the release and then the next week we get into the hard articles of like showing painted models and Yeah, and then deep dive stuff. Yes Do you think we'll get the the doc book the same weekend? Yeah, that's what they said The the original article said they're coming out the same time. So I assume they'll both go on pre-order together I I predict that whenever we whatever week that happens and will be a very expensive week for me I predict that with a hundred percent certainty Not for myself. I will I'll take a book, please. Sure. Sure. Just one. You're not gonna get the endless spells You're gonna get them docked on the spells. Don't play like you're not don't play like you. Yeah Yeah, I mean they could be bad like I have a box I have multiple locks of endless spells that are literally just sitting on the shelf never never to be enough But you know you need them because if one of them gets good you're gonna be like I want that and oftentimes and the spells will just suddenly get good when they drop by 20 points. Yeah Yeah Yep So That's coming slinnish Uh, we have a white dwarf preview FEC is getting some love with the tomes celestial. Yes, and anvil apotheosis Focused on death people. So, okay The anvil upon death death egosis Yes more rules for anvil apotheosis Just in general. I am in that's fine. That's great. I think it's fun narrative stuff Yeah, the tome will contain they also mentioned it has like some fec versus a obr battle plans And I was like I don't care because I don't really care about those kinds of special battle plans That are specifically built and tailored to two very specific armies, right? I like narrative battle plans if they have A sort of generic nature to them of like they're meant to be used with any two armies But you're doing a narrative thing, right? The army a is trying to accomplish something r e b is trying to stop them Whatever Cool beans. I just don't tend to care about the ones where it's like it uses a bunch of rules that are very specific to one army Especially to two armies. I don't own Right, right, right, but yeah, I'll be interested to see what they do with fec and what new rules they give them It's clearly meant to represent the particular charnel kingdom that archon is trying to recruit Here's the question I have for you tom It has been discussed a lot whether or not this spoils broken realms This white dwarf article because in the lead up to the white dwarf article It says that archon is attacking eumetrica in response to teclis Like striking out against the ossear bone reapers Right And so the question is either is this was you know did because of the release schedules Getting moved around was this white dwarf supposed to be like archons reprisal for The events of broken realms teclis Okay Yes, what I'll say is this Or is this just the lead up like teclis starts pushing back against the bone reapers archon says You know, okay fine. That's how you want to play it. He goes and invades eumetrica You know one of the great nations right and then teclis sees the destruction that's wrought and is like, okay I see this is for real now. I'm not messing around with you people anymore. I'm going after your boss Mmm. That's a good good. That's a good proposal My anticipation was is that it's actually, uh, I think teclis is gone Doing his thing doing his mission that's been uh promote like suggested is what he's going to do And and archons like awesome. I'm in you know, and he goes after eumetrica while teclis is gone That's what my guess is because because like this is providing some background as to what happens when teclis is doing his own Okay, that's my guess We'll see So, but yes, that would be really disappointing if he if teclis is going after ocear Because like I wouldn't go into the heart of shyish Yeah, we wanted to go like we've been promised a showdown at the okay corral here, right right at the black pyramid Yes, I like that's what I want Uh teclis by the way in this is absolutely wider even though I don't like texas texas. Sorry. I like texas just fine I don't like teclis. Uh I still would I still would rather him be the proof. He's still the protagonist over to gosh. Sorry. That's just how this is Yeah, I would love Like because the reason why I think archon has the freedom to go after eumetrica Is because I think teclis is completely bound with what he's doing. Sure. Sure Like because if teclis is just next door if he's in the all points, right messing with the ocear that's there That's not going to be enough. No, and that's that like I said, that's why I hope that um That we have a real good solid punch up here Like what we want to see is a is a climactic showdown That's what we want Yeah, I am not going to be surprised if teclis just punches a hole In the shyish gaze to the all points and saunas right on through Sure. I well, you know what? I don't want the end of season one of heroes That's what I don't want Don't have them if they're they were about to fight and then we closed the door and we just saw some flashing lights underneath No, oh gosh. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, you remember that let down Oh, man, you didn't have to say that. It's just so much build up So much build up save the cheerleaders in the world. It's a bad show. What else we got? um You know, I'm gonna jump to another a different item than on our list You can do these in whatever order you like tom. You're the master of the news uh, so uh, we had uh Aos tangential thing News drop today in an article of a new board game called blade board. That's for war cry But boxed in it are two of the underworld's war bands um And like a lot of people were like, oh big crossover. You know what you know what this is This is just a cheap quick and dirty intro box to war cry. That's all this is This is a starter war box. It's probably its retail is 60 dollars um, which is basically the cost of both war bands sure Plus the cardboard that you need and in fact, it would be cheaper just to buy the war bands than to buy this box game That doesn't matter. Um and uh I'm gonna buy it Yeah, I mean it seems like a great intro Uh work I said, I mean, that's what it is. It's just an intro work. I said, right? The bright side of it is it will likely bring the rules for Either some or all or we will get all of the uh underworld's war bands in war cry, which is fantastic How amazing would that be if we got everybody? Yeah, and yes, it's on hexes unlike normal war cry, but again, that's because it's the intro game it's also flat with no like Vertical terrain to speak of in the traditional sense because that's how they always do intro games because intro games are meant to be Very straightforward and require you to have Basically nothing else besides what's there in the box to play Right, and so you get no terrain because probably they're going to use terrain tiles Like they do with underworlds because that's how underworlds does terrain Um, so they're gonna have terrain tiles and they're doing hexes because they're invoking the under like they're trying to pull underworlds Community folks into war cry. That's what's going on here. Yeah, this is called the next step This is the next step on your gateway Journey, right Like you got into underworlds because it's simple and it's four figs and it's card like game and they're like, okay Well, hey, we got another game that uses cards They they're they're different and it's more of some dice and stuff But here's a single game models same models You can just play this and while you're getting into war cry Then you're gonna get into war cry and you're gonna start buying more chunks of armies and then eventually you just buy a Whole army. Why not just? Right, you know, you know those uh those war bands that are fighting each other They're in the same army in a line. So if you buy that you have like you put them together You have like 200 points. You're basically there. You're basically at an army Yeah, uh, yeah um Maybe 300 uh, so Yeah, I'm excited about this product. I love products like this. I love when they do the intro stuff I not just because you get cheap models um Like I love uh, I love what it does for our community. It gives options Sure Can we talk about the the while we're on this subject? Obviously the the ravagers what you're talking about the day we saw their war scroll as well Nope, which is the the four chaos warrior. Well, I guess three chaos warriors and the chaos sorcerer or whatever uh, the sisters and their two friends basically And uh, did you catch the points on them? No, I didn't So they're fine like as a war scroll as per usual as an underworld's war band like for me guess, uh, they're 80 points No, they are not Um, because I mean it's it's decent enough for what all they can do Oh, wait, let me guess 130 You're so close 125 Exactly right 120. Yeah, I remember Yeah, I remember uh, yes, because it was the five it was the five that caught my eye because we've not had five point increments Exactly. Yeah, I actually had this conversation with somebody else Nico in fact. Um, I think that this is the spoiler For aos 3.0 that we're going to go into five point increments Yep Yes, as as goob said kagras kagras pals. Yes, it's like, you know, yeah kagra and and her pals. Yes Uh, I do not want five point increments get out of here with this I think we're at five point increments. Oh my god, and here they are so dumb Yeah, if look if it wasn't fair at 130 125 it doesn't matter Okay, it doesn't matter It's just not how games are it's just not it's not the way the game works What we need here is not a more fine-tuned balance on five point increments That's not what was keeping beasts of chaos at 41 percent or whatever. Okay, we need to rewrite war scrolls Are you ready for loadouts to have their own pointing? No, I mean no get out of here with that crap. That's never gonna happen That's not happening Like it just won't it just won't because there's no reason they would push to that Unless you mean like in the broadest sense of how it already did you think that there would be Uh pointing with We'd go to five point increments. No, but I still don't know we are it's just possible that literally they made this one thing like that again I mean, let me propose to you a war There is no way there are enough people who touch that war scroll that nobody looked in that went Why is this on fives tom? They put up the big winner f aq and two of the point scrolls were from the last G hb. What the holy hell are you talking about? There's no way No, but the problem is I understand that that's that's f aq. That's like correcting problems We're no no no no, but you're gonna have less people touching that than from all the way from design Through development and playtesters and all that like i'm sure playtesters would have looked at that and went We have no other fives Because this is five whatever that's the amount it came to we felt like trying it out You know, I don't know like look, maybe it will maybe it won't I'm I'm saying if you ask me sure 60 40 They'll go to five point increments, which I think is done Okay, I'm just not saying that there's no way that you immediately fall down the slippery slope Beyond like what you're what you already have when the loadout is so relatively different than it actually necessitates We load out our pass orders right I've got three loadouts working out. Sure Pass orders what I'm you you go to you basically go to three entries based on like sort of sort of board halberd and Great weapon or whatever. No No Unless you literally rewrote the war scrolls to make them so different that they ended up like kerrnauth hunters Like kerrnauth hunters have three separate scrolls and three separate things, right? But that's because those those weapon loadouts are so different as to necessitate like literally individual balance Right and maybe some some war scrolls. They need that and some don't I don't know I'm just saying it wouldn't surprise me if we are moving towards more fine-tuning One way to do that is to put low to lower the increments Another way to sure sure is to tweak loadouts Uh-huh. You know, you know what you have to do before you fine-tune Tune I got it. Yeah, there you go. Correct. Correct answer Okay, like and I'm not trying to be a jerk here. I like I'm just saying I'm trying not to take shots at the at the At the team. I'm not either. I'm but here's my point. You got low hanging fruit Okay, it's literally like reach up. There's these ripe apples. You can pluck called war scroll fixes Okay, allegiance ability fixes. These are low hanging fruits five point increments That's at the top of the tree. You had to get out a ladder to get to that one. Okay Not this we got a lot of fruit. We may have a new addition This is what I'm saying. We might have a new addition is because they're like, well if we're moving to To a new addition and we're going to tweak these other things Maybe we should redo the system because this is like the key with five point increments Is that you're actually getting into the nuts and the bolts of how like the whole system is designed to interact with one another When you go to fives Okay, and so my my my Premise is that I think if we're moving to fives That talks about systemic changes like the addition of endless spells in second edition that type of like that type of systemic change maybe My my point is it's there's no need for it You already aren't getting ballot like my point is the dividend that would pay is not equal to the complexity Every design change you make has a cost a good and a bad. That's true for every game element you had You know, I explain it to the audience. Okay So The the point is is that okay? What do you buy? You buy some amount of ability to adjust points in a more granularity What you lose is complexity in building Okay, you lose like like you end up with more complexity in making individual points work in making units balanced properly Because now you can be wrong in different ways slightly. So you're constantly chasing the dragon You add to your quote unquote technical debt of game design Because now you have complaints about it being five points wrong one of the other direction And now if you move it that much you're really doing nothing. We already think 10 point moves do nothing Welcome to five point moves, which will really do nothing. That's half of nothing Okay, so at any rate, but this isn't the show tonight It's gonna be so amazing for people like me who like to go in and like list tune And like adjust and i'm like, okay, I need five more. What if I do this? Yeah, what's next and move these two around? What's next? Okay, what's um What's next something that's not aos related? Hello, dear. Hi. Is oin jackson here? No, he's not here tonight. It's just tom I know I know we were all like I know it's no fun It's so funny that kathy does a great job of interrupting the most Moment of the show Uh, and that is we had the most amazing thing that I argue is even better than these dogs That's not true, but go ahead keep talking. It is true The trailer for total war three war hammer Oh god came out photo war war hammer three came out and it's amazing. It has polar bears in zarina and It's amazing Oh, he wants me to go But i'm not interesting Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever That trailer Was so hype It was so hype Like and I know you were not as hyped as I was vince Like I loved it. I loved every you know how many times I watched I watched that trailer a lot today. Okay Like and it for me it harkens back to like the feeling I got Unlike the city invasion trailer for a war hammer age of reckoning or the or the warrior priest chaos warrior fight Uh for a war Like those trailers like it simply doesn't get much better than that Cool. I mean, do you want me to write on your parade? I don't know what I don't know what you're wanting your tom You're leaving space for me I don't care about gameplay trailers that have nothing to do with actual gameplay in a video game You mean not gameplay trailers. You mean cinematic cars. I thank you Yes, I don't care about cinematic trailers that have nothing to do with actual gameplay like that's cool. That's fine. Uh It was an amazing three minutes No, I am gonna talk about something tom hold up. Hold the phone. We're gonna have this conversation right now We're left turning. Here we go. Everybody ready. Here's what that trailer made me think. I didn't really like it I don't care. I don't like total work. Whatever if you do and I know it's very popular I'm sure it was a great trailer for you. The Zarina is cool and as an ice queen She's cool and bears are cool and all that whatever fun Here's what I'm talking about Yeah, they're great. Okay. Here's what I want to talk about in that trailer the Zarina like marches all She's ba right walks out of her tent. She's like summoning up ice and stuff And then she walks up that little hill is all her people are fighting Demons and whatever and she gets to the top of that little crest and she like stares down this blood thirster and like makes little icicles And i'm like, okay five seconds later. She's splattered on that rock. Like I don't care. That's irrelevant. She's dead Okay Because I say she's awesome. Sure. Yeah, okay one I don't think that's actually what would happen in the game. I'm pretty sure she should get killed by the blood thirster in the game I know where this conversation is going. I know where this conversation is going and two Why that's not how heroes work like, okay So she is effectively some kind of five wound wizard hero, right? In aos terms sure in aos terms put her into melee with a blood thirster and see what happens on the other side And blood thirsters aren't the scariest monster, but he's gonna make paste out of her Like that and what that got me thinking about was the fact that we have no No, like Archetypical badasses in this Uh in this game in aos. This is something that I realized this occurred to me What I mean by that is a hero on foot Who is capable of killing Much larger things than themselves with relative like You know reliability Okay, there's there's one exception, but continue. Yeah, the one exception being go trek, right? Who can splat his way through basically the entire Table if he gets up And he's pointed appropriately and he's pointed appropriately and that's just it The reason is because everybody's saying go trick. Yes. I understand go trick exists people. Jesus beats Um, I was I was getting there. Give me a second Well, it's just like but this is an arcing go track. I'm aware of going track This is point those that this is an archetype Yes, okay. This is absolutely one One instance of it. I'll give you one and a half because the only other close one in the game right now Is maybe the light of eltharian, right? And as I was thinking about this what occurred to me is why don't we have more of these like three or Like take these foot heroes. There's ways to make them survivable And have them be like three or four hundred points, right where you can actually do that everything right now if you want to be a Like super billy ba you got to get on top of some big monster. That's the only way people get that awesome And yet this is a you can have an artifact. Absolutely. This is a super classic archetype, by the way Like the oldest of archetypes. This is gilgamesh. This is hercules. This is david and goliath This is st. George killing the dragon. This is john wick. Like this is a 5000 year archetype, okay Where it's this Singular human who because of like grit and skill and whatever Right, uh, they are capable of of just walking up and doing the dirty business and taking out giant monsters and felling them and Yeah, there's a reason why we don't take the slaughter queen on foot Right, right exactly. And so all of these heroes on foot are all supposed to be like legendary killers And it just doesn't we don't have any heroes like that and somebody already mentioned one of the things I wanted to be like this the monster that should be like, yeah, thank you. Beowulf is another one I mean like literally there's this is a hero with a thousand faces Like there are so many examples of this this archetype and trope in mythic and epic fiction and and such And it can sky walk Sure, sure I want so so what I want is I want the night quester to be moved up to like 350 points Okay, and I want him to be this guy And I want him to put out that level of pain and have that level of survivability on five wounds You can read him out Three damage attacks nake three rend only takes one damage eight attacks only takes one damage and it can Unrendable and an aftersave sure like yeah, go nuts. I mean there's a hundred ways you could construct this type of thing, right? Yeah, and So like I want to have and the mortal realm seems so suited to this. It's literally mythic fantasy Right, and you don't have any of these mythic people who aren't writing monsters Right like if you put the person on foot against the guy on the monster They lose every time basically right unless they're go track and 50 percent of time the light of ultarion depending on what he's sitting across from All right, I think the closest opportunity we have for something like this is sigval Maybe he'll be good enough. Maybe he won't who knows but I mean he's on a hundred like he's like he's on a 60 Is he on a 60? Yeah, that was what they that was it was in the picture. It was a 60. Yeah, you could tell why what was near him Yeah, I don't know like that still doesn't feel small Sure, it's like that. I understand it's like big but I mean to be fair the chaos lord with The chaos lord of corn with doggo is also on a 60 mil so I mean, it's yeah, I mean a hundred mil is not a lot larger and that's the gosh Well, like actually it's quite a bit larger in in In space because that's actually it's the whole like you can fit to 10 inch pizza 14 inch pizza You know how you know how diameter works. I do know how diameter works. Thank you The point being that like the space on the table that it's taking up like it doesn't feel a lot larger Right, there just feels like there's this is a space that they could explore With these like epic heroes who are so good at their job You could spread these around factions like I could construct an archetype like that You could see a corn hero getting to that level very easily, right? Just like some epic slaughterer You could see uh an elvish hero like alvarian getting there. You could see a daughter of cane You know slaughter queen getting up to that level like you can pick Something out of most factions that would seem to fit this Right and yet they don't exist because I think if they look at the model and literally go if it's smaller It has to be weaker Because they're eyeballing it off the model And so with the the only exception being go track where they where they really broke the rules wide open Right, because it's like the narrative was driving. Yeah Because it's go track So at any rate, I want to see them make some Super ba's like because what I want the end of that trailer to be is the zarina Spiking that bloodthirster like a football Right, you want to see her like put her hands up and like giant Like cuffs and chains of ice Form around his hands and his legs and just wrench into the ground and then spikes fly ice like spikes fly out of her And shred his wings off and he falls down onto his feet And then just like as he's down there on the ground just one massive spike of ice Shoots up out of the ground behind him and plunges right through the center of him And it just erupts in flame and rime fire as he slides this bloody mess down the back of this This thing by the way higher meter to storyboard your trailers. I'll do a great job That would have been way cooler, but that's not the situation that's going to happen instead. She's just dead In the game we're in a os she's just dead So shame Anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about that was a tangent, but it was really bothering me Like so cafe is going to be in uh total war warhammer 3 2 yeah cool stuff That's exciting like it'll be neat to see treatment of these guides said to some of uh, some of our friends that I feel like It's clear like it's coming becoming clear that the old world project that began brewing It seems to be on a similar development cycle Like at least starting with like conceptual stuff and art art resources and stuff like that and they've kind of alluded to this It seems to correspond a little bit with the total war three like there seems to be some degree of overlap there So it's a really fascinating Imply you know like one of the implications of that being like I just wonder how much when they saw How how much of a hit like how much of a hit how much of a cause Is there between the old world? project and what has happened with with uh Total war you ever seen a venn diagram where the two circles completely overlap Yeah, sure like yes because obvi Right, I mean and and also by the way I love seeing things like kate and kiss levin this kind of art And then working together and that being the thing and what we're going to explore because my honest answer is If you're going to do the old world you better explore stuff like this If you just rehash the same tired not europe concepts and don't explore these other things that were in your world That we always wanted armies for and never got what are you even doing? Why even do this project? Well, and I think they had to earn it. I know it sounds really weird, but it feels like they had to like Cover their bases with one and two So that they could do the demons, which that's fine I could say And I'm I I can't wait to actually hear the story of what's going on Of kiss loving to say holding back the demonic hordes of the north um and then uh Those two and you know what my what i'm anticipating for the free bonus faction because like they always have a pre-order faction that you get for free sure um, I suspect we'll see uh cast workforce Hey, that's that's Like I think that like it could be ogres But I suspect that it'll be chaos towards or at least we will get them with the first expansion if they're not If ogres are the the launch army sure All right Excited what one more news item a long actually, you know, I take that back Uh, ogres will be the launch because of the winter stuff the ever went like the the winter Yeah, like the ogres overlap too much in that space um But the cast wars will probably be the first expansion back like the tomb kings for total war two. Sure. That's what i'm calling. Okay. Um We have some news um, and then finally No, that's it. No, we have one more idea Boom the soulbound beastie area got announced with this wonderful picture of the mega gargant with his dog With his with his uh proud uh pappo Yeah, this if you saw the scene where my dog was climbing on me just a few minutes ago Like everybody was talking about how it looks like the the dog brought him the stick And he's like picking up. No, no, this is I've seen the scene. You just saw it happen right there like My dogs are very aggressively affectionate as you just saw so Absolutely So this is just the giant trying to keep his dog from assaulting his new friends This these his four friends came over to visit him here And the dog is trying to like jump on them and when you have a giant When you have a giant magma droth as a pet like you gotta hold him back, right? So he's just like all right come on behave yourself behave yourself I'm gonna whack you with a stick like that's what's going on Uh boy. No, he is he's uh this little magma droth's a good little boy Uh, I do love the very brave andren rigger up there. It's just up in the corner. That dude is just going in This that dude's about to get golf swinged out of the sky Uh, so yeah, new bestiary for soulbound. That's cool. Um I found it pretty easy to make monsters in soulbound when I ran my own Game because you can literally just take any of the monsters and pretty easy Monsters are a pretty simple construction in the game. Yeah, you just like re-skin them And it's pretty straightforward. You add like one relevant special ability and call it a day But I'm happy to see this because I think you know people like that kind of stuff You know, just like they announced. Oh later in the year, we'll do destruction and death heroes and I'm like Why just it's one special ability for your for your race. It's not a hard thing But I guess some people like arc types. I don't know why but uh That's how some people like to play so more power to them great game Okay, that's the news boy. Oh boy. There we go Long news section that that's all right Uh, so Tom Let's get to some pick of the week Uh, what do you want to share with everybody today, Tom? Uh You know what? I'm just gonna do it. Uh the total war war hammer trailer. We're gonna link it. That's fine Put in the comments because I love that thing I have no issue with that. I understand why I get why Some people like it so much. It just didn't hit with me because I don't care But I'm not gonna reign on your break Uh, my pick by the way gw. I know you're watching come over to camera too. Um There's a really great opportunity here these wonderful cinematics that we've had for these games for all these years You know, you've you've launched, uh An animation studio Why don't you give us some like 10 to 15 minute shorts? Yeah some of these stories We need like a love. Was it love death and robots or whatever that that we need that kind of an animated special Right with just the 15 minute shorts, but like set in the mortal realms be amazing. Yeah Yeah, and even the old world like I would love to see Um, yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity here. That's all I'm saying Sure, um, and I want to see more as arena And tell then and be able to tell my kids that the trailer for frozen three came out Yeah, that's gosh darn it. That was the other joke. I wanted to make shoot I forgot about it. My response to you was going to be I tried to keep that in the bag My response to you was going to be I thought that trailer for frozen three was pretty weird But yes at any rate you got it All right, my pick of the week Uh, so honest wargamer rob is back to doing his breakfast battles, which are a lot of fun So if you want to watch some tts we talked about tts last week if you're interested and on the fence You can watch a game be played and today He uh played adam mumford and he is running night haunt, which is great I know there's a lot of night haunt fans out there and tom adam mumford ran spider fang today Awesome, so it was night haunt against spider fang I will not I will not spoil the outcome of the game, but they were playing on scorched earth. So the you know eight objectives Um, so it was a real fun game. You don't see them spiders in action I uh, I uh, bruce city Um, for all I was chatting and uh reading their pack and they're 2,500 points I was like, you know, I could take 2,500 points of spiders to bruce city Just so many spiders. Yeah. Yeah all the spiders. Yeah, you'd be like fighting As you're just you're just mobilizing like australia to go to war. Yes. Absolutely done Okay, uh, yeah, so check that out if you want to see the spider fang engage with the night haunt. It's it's uh, it was a fun fun, uh breakfast battle so very cool and adam's a very funny guy Uh part way through the game He started just like grabbing other assets and setting him on the table to see if rob would notice like a croak on a bail wind just showed up randomly and uh Stuff like that just started popping into the game. So Yeah, it was a good time. All right, let's talk about some hobby time So hobby time Tom what's been on your uh, your table this week? Uh, well, I've been exploring some additional hobby space. Okay Um, and so uh, a lot of my hobby time has been a house hunting. Sure. Uh, But uh, uh, I'm prepping for this weekend. Uh, I'm making the drive up to columbus And vinson are going to throw some dice this weekend. So I've been prepping for that It's going to be an intense weekend. Many games will be played. It's going to be a good time Uh, for myself since I don't really have a current army project I'm trying to focus on things that I find fun or interesting. You can't really see it, but right here There's a big piece of terrain. Uh, that's over there prepped to be painted. They'll probably make a video about and since everybody's talking about, uh You know, since there was a big discussion about vampires. I got this model out, which is a 54 millimeter pirate lady and uh, I'm doing her like a vampire and she's going to be in like this very cold moonlight And she doesn't show up well here, which you can see sort of the light on that side and the darkness on that side And uh, yeah, I'm very happy with how she's coming along. Uh, she's a lot of a lot of fun Uh, old mini I've had for a while and I just wanted to get out and paint it and I just I couldn't I'm actually Happy enough with how she's coming out. It's a fun experiment in incredibly muted colors. Like I'm trying to To really desaturate everything down because she's in faint moonlight, right? Um, so there you go Uh, okay Tom My friend are you ready To get into the negative play experience survey Man, we've been trying to define this for a really long time. We have so let's talk about npe Before we get into the results of the survey, what's your feelings about sort of npe? Right, like how do you think of it? I know you've looked at the survey, but 40 000 would be you What do you see this as being not just how what is it to you? I'm saying what is it in concept? Uh, I don't think it exists npe is only There aren't bad rules. It's just bad players um No, I I mean what i'll say is this there uh it for me npe has only Um has has I mean by definition is a negative play experience and more often than not To me most play experiences Can be resolved through information okay Not it not exhaustively, but most of the time There are things that can be done If you are aware of them, but sometimes those things have to be started like the list building phase. Sure. So Yeah, which can be not fun if you want to play a specific list, right? If you're not willing like if you have things you love right to play then that can make you more or less likely to find npe Right one of the the challenges in defining what a negative play experience is is that to me There's always been so many differing opinions on it Right and even sort of trying to put any kind of box around this concept Is just really hard because people play this game and see this game in lots of different ways right They play for lots of different reasons. We've talked about psychographic profiling before You know you got the old johnny timmy spike and all of that But in addition, there's just a lot of different reasons why people enjoy or don't enjoy a game right game to game You mentioned their particular list could be a horrible matchup There could be particular rules or rules interactions that dice go against them Like and that could sort of color how they perceive the efficacy of the other army, right Yep, um, so there's just lots and lots of of sort of conflicting concepts going on here That's why I really wanted to do this survey because I wanted to get to the idea of like, okay Let's get to the actual bottom of this right Like I mean if it's possible sure if it's possible Let's see if we can try to draw some kind of conclusions Around what the heck we're all talking about Because it seems like we we say it most of us feel it Right and yet it's so elusive to define Okay, so with that being said it's powerpoint time folks. That's right. All right. Let's go into So that's gonna cover up tom and I you can't see us anymore, but that's all right Uh, let me go ahead and put this into powerpoint mode Swap views Minimize that now I can see us. Okay, so negative play experience. I like this cover by the way Do you get what I'm referencing with the cover of the uh Of the survey tom Nope, okay with with the first page. So obviously lord croak Right, that's that's who's over on the left. Oh, and then the middle one is uh, the uh, lumineff Yes, exactly. That was the tricky one. Yes total eclipse Like just the worst Yeah Do you like not using your command point? Do you like Shutting off an entire mechanic of your army. Yeah, great. Oh, no no no a tire mechanic of the core game of the core game Yeah, whoever designed that spell It's bad and you should feel bad. Okay. That's literally what I'll say about that spell Okay, so let's get into it first just a quick overview of the survey. There were 785 respondents A little less than I liked but that's okay if you didn't respond. That's on you Yeah, but that's all right, uh, respondents selected the armies they played in a multi-select So unlike the previous ones we've done uh players where where I forced people to pick a particular army You know to say like this was your one army this time we allowed people to multi-select all the armies they play Uh The bar here that I set was if you had experienced NPE and at least one game in the last two years That was not and I emphatically Repeated this on every single question where it was asked that was not dependent on facing a bad player or bad, you know, not of someone who was a jerk basically Right, right. It is the mechanics of the army or the game not Of the player. Yes, absolutely Uh respondents indicated the items they felt were a negative play experience in a multi-select and were also allowed to leave general comments Boy, oh boy. Were there a lot, uh, I went through all them. I picked a very small selection We'll review here at the end here Um, I'm going to try to find a place to put up the raw data Of all of the surveys we've done So if other people want to take them and take a look at them and, you know, find their own do their own data synthesis Uh, that's fine. Okay. So, um, you can look through all the verbatims. Obviously everything's anonymized I never know who is responding to anything. None of this is and and what I'll post up will be filtered out even from anything Like that it will just literally be the answers so okay So nobody will ever know what anybody said. I can't see what you said. I don't know who took any survey I never asked for people's name or anything like that Uh, so nothing like that All right. First off, let's get into one of the most interesting Things that came out of this and it was the first question okay So armies played Now remember this like if you look at this it totals to weigh more than 785, right? I mean right because Again people can multi-select here, right? Yep But this one just fascinated the living bejesers out of me. Okay. So good. Yep because Here we go Let's really take a look at what this means again. People were allowed to select every army they played Let's look up here stormcast Eternals cities slaves to darkness night hot oryx gloomspite Maw tribes Skaven, right? So like all of these the top part of this Right the top chunk of this List Yep Are all of the fat middle middle performing? Yeah, yeah armies. Yep, right? Uh And then you can we can even keep going down right like legions maggotkin blades, right? Then you get you Go ahead Could you pull the data on how many people played multiple armies? Yeah, yeah, yeah the answer is a lot But yes, I do have that data I just wonder if like a lot of people started with fat middle armies and then picked up a second army. That's better Well, and so what's interesting is as you go down the list you get into all the broken stuff Right, right like disciples flesh eaters ox yarks KO I'd neth seraphon I'm gonna say lumineath and sons are mostly exempt here because they could be fulfilling like they they're both very recent Right, so it's hard to know how real that data is very recent armies that just released like that. It's tough To yeah, because they're still hitting their saturation points. Yeah, you don't know what there's you don't know What they're true of community saturation, so yeah daughters heat knights, right fire slayers like What so and then like obviously there's this outlier and beast of chaos which proves just like sometimes an army is so bad That you know, if you remember People just and and there's whole models. Don't worry like it's not only are they bad They also have really old models And by the way, the best data that we have is knight hawn is certainly in the fat middle Wsoren that it like it still exists within the 40 to 60 percent win rate area, right? But when you get the the top of the like look, this is the best performing armies Dot obr ko idna seraphon dock Fire slayers the best ones are all in the bottom universally Right, yeah with disciples being the highest outlier Yep, right Maybe slaves Well, I mean slaves again slaves has had a real rally magikin has had a real real rally in recent events Sure ish Like as as near as we can tell but again slaves. I think most people Feel is a pretty fair army like yes marauders are kind of weird But like the really busted janky stuff you see often with slaves of darkness models are happening like in disciples of zinch For example in host arcane, right? It's not happening in the slaves allegiance. Yeah Maybe idolaters will change all that But I I just found this so fascinating right because The highest competitive armies and again, there are exceptions like I said like beast being way down here is clearly just because one uh Aesthetically they didn't score very high. So they're not drawing people in on the models, right? Like knight right for whatever it's worth. Remember it killed the aesthetic survey people love these models right? and You know beast didn't rank that high on the aesthetics It's clearly one of the weakest armies if not the weakest army currently in circulation right Uh, and so but you know there there are exceptions. But when you look at this like Two things popped out to me from this one competitive armies aren't the things people play the most Number one they play what they want to paint. Yeah, they they play what they want to paint and they play there is real value here to gw Okay Yeah in hitting the fat middle with your armies Busted armies are played less The fact that they're played more in the competitive scene is not representative of that army's placement as a whole Right, that's what these data says Right. Yeah. Yeah, like very clearly what this data says That the armies that actually get played and hence by the by get bought Are the ones that people feel have good aesthetics and sit in the fat middle Yes, so the more they design towards the middle The more popular an army is but like it's is it correlation causation. Who knows who knows? I can only say they correlate I can't say it's a correct cause. Yes, right um No, I did that is a really striking observation It and and it so flies in the face of the normal competitive thing of like oh gw makes rules busted So we all buy it No That's not actually what happens. There is a negative correlation between those two things Right, okay, right like fire slayers are often straight impossible for some armies to beat Okay Yep They are at the bottom. Remember they also scored the worst on the aesthetic survey People aren't buying or playing this army. They're not playing it. They don't like its look They're not buying it. It's like me and it's like me and Kenny and a couple other folks, right Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean poor legion of asgore down there, but again not a real army. I I love the drop off of how Yes So, you know, whatever like that. Well, and now it's really not why legion it's really not a real army It's not even on the website anymore. Correct. Yeah Yeah, yeah And it also as we go on through here the other thing that I see in this data set is that npe Not only influences people not playing the armies, right that is to say being powerful Uh and being like a a meta breaker not only is negatively correlated with people playing the army But it has a long tail on it Okay Heat knights is actually a pretty weak army right now at the moment, right at the current moment slanesh is actually a pretty weak army It's not busted It's not top-tabling anything. You're gonna have armies that you're gonna fight in a lot of fights where you just get beaten badly. Okay. Yeah. Yeah Yet it still ranks super low Now aesthetic wise it was pretty much in the in the middle like it was fine people, you know Like it had a pretty strong love hate correlation, right? If you remember nergal was the dead center of that but slanesh wasn't far off and Like but slanesh was so toxic Okay Yeah That it poisoned people's perception of the army now now. Why am I saying that beyond just this number? I have to be drawing that for more than this number. I'm drawing that from the like 800 verbatims that I read of people leaving comments Yeah, the number of comments that were like my biggest npe was I played my the pre FAQ slanesh Yeah, yep That was like if I did a word cloud Out of it, you know, if I just dumped all of I should have thought about that. I didn't do it I should have thought about that. Um, if I just dumped all the verbatim Yeah, so that should be huge Right Yep, so The the point being is that like even though it's had a low even though it's fallen These that kind of toxicity Has such a long tail on it, right? Right. It's poisonous. Yes. It's poisons the community. It's poisons to those armies in the long run, right? Exactly Uh, you saw the same thing by the way with with OCR coming up a lot less but still came up a lot, right? Right of like I played against petrofex elite three up in my army just bounced off and then I died It was the opposite of fun Yep, right So, yep, it This was such a revealing chart to me because What this says to me is that the armies that are popular the armies people want to play the armies people buy The armies people like to play are the ones that are fun and hit the fat middle and they feel like they get good games out of Which seems pretty obvious Yep, right In general I like in so I may I find myself making distinctions between games that I'm going to play with friends And what I take to those games and games that I play competitively sure like I don't like Uh, like vent for example when I showed up to play my ko last summer. Yeah Did I bring any endless spells? Uh, no, I don't think you had any spell in a bottle Nope, I didn't I just didn't bring it. Yeah, you know, like I took a bunch of thunderers. Sure Like because that's the point, right? Yeah. Yeah, you play you also try to bunch different lists and you know yada yada Right because I like I'm not trying to beat vents Yeah, we're just trying to have an interesting game and I was running wacky like all sorus Saraphon lists and stuff with Thunder lizards with no bestillodons, right? Just like all stegodons because let's go But that's the point is that like the things that are that I'm most likely to field with friends, which are a majority of my games Are gonna be fun lists. They're playful. They're exploratory. You want to play a full game You don't want to set up your toys and like, you know, you don't want to take that long set of your toys Table them in the first 30 minutes and then go. Okay. Well, that was fun Well, what do you want to do now? You want to re-rack? No, they don't want to re-rack like like most players Most players that's not, you know, like yes, there are some clubs that that is certainly uh, the the norm But that's not the majority. Yeah, and so my my point simply being that like it makes sense that like most of people are playing Kind of the fat metal fun armies. Yep. Yep All right, let's keep going. I just I found this chart so fascinating because when I looked at it I was like holy crap. It's the exact inverse of The power rankings Right. Yeah It was it was revelatory to me Uh, all right, let's just cool. Let's just real quickly just to compare to that by the way I've got some comparison slides here from the previous survey Uh, this is the armies played from the balance survey where you could only pick one right Yep And so obviously this survey was some time ago, but it still reflects the same thing stormcast oryx magikin Slaves of darkness ogres cities gets all up top, right? The the the breaker here was this was much closer before the seraphon book was sort of seen as being Was and they've fallen way down Right with right with a lot more people like this you had that people were picking his primary there They're not even picking it as playing right Blades silvineth like all in all this is a very similar ish list Like right when you because we did this one like Couple weeks after lumenet launched. Yep. Yep. Yep. So about nine months ago And so To me it's fascinating that now we have multiple data points Both when I pushed people to identify the single army that they consider themselves a player of Right and if I just said okay pick all the armies you play Right Both yeah, he's similar distributions. We see similar distributions of the the power broker Metta busting armies just being Down. Yep being the bottom of the chart Never like and that means not feeding the sales not getting played again A tournament meta would warp that right one would expect that you're gonna see that a different spread But that is why the tournament meta is not representative of quote unquote The the one what's being purchased and to the like Metta of you and your friends Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah I just thought that was interesting because comparing those two. I was like, wow, those are so very similar right Yep All right, uh Finally, I want to bring back one more thing from the the previous survey because we're going to talk about npe a lot And so it would be easy to say That oh the game is in a bad place So this is the state of the game Yeah, this is last year. This is last year, but still Well, it's still I mean it is relevant for the it is relevant And what's relevant is that there are plenty of people who think they're either neutral or negative But overall age of sigmar being in a good place when we did that survey Only 15 of the people said they disagreed with that statement or strongly disagreed with that statement total. Yeah So I think that's a good sign now. I don't I would love to run this one again at some point run these kind of questions, right? sort of state of the game questions Uh The I have a fair matchup Much worse Right Yeah, yeah And so I think that's interesting and we're gonna see like this has been a year where we've had some strong npe enter the the The arena, but it's also a year where we got rid of some of it as we'll get into Okay, so With high level data out of the way Let's turn to our negative play experience results Yeah, all right. So experienced npe 774 people answered this question I don't know how 11 people skip this question. This is fascinating to me that anybody Why do you take the survey and skip the question if you 11 people if you're watching this right now? This was a radio button where you clicked one of two things. This was too complicated At any rate 774 people answered it with 71.45 of the respondents saying yes and 28.5 saying no And remember yes in this context means that the player has experienced npe because of an opponent's army at least once In the last two years. I set the bar very very low Yeah, that is a very low bar in the last two years of play Have you had one game where you consider where you experienced npe? right again directly because of The rules not because of a bad player Would you say that you have had that events in the last two years? Yes, I would I would have answered yes to this question. I mean I took the survey myself, right? I mean I'm I'm one person my opinion counts. Of course. Of course who wouldn't container. I mean You saw yes. I answered yes Uh, but here's what I'll say. I was actually kind of surprised by this And what I mean by that is I was surprised that no was that high Like I don't know if I would answer. Yes. Like I mean no like I can understand the no's. Let me say that Yeah, so why go ahead and give me your thought on it Because again, like I You're not generally someone sensitive to npe is what you're saying like to you It's more like oh, I should have made a different list or I should have played differently or something like that Yes, like yes, like I should have thought it or I knew what this was going in Like I knew what the strengths and weaknesses were so I just accepted What the experience was because I knew what it was going to be before I experienced it Like I wasn't encountering rules for the first time sure I knew that I wasn't going to get command points when this matchup happened Okay, okay, like I knew that I need to align my things so that I like even if I get Pushed to fight last in combat. I have another reprisal I knew like and so that's why I kind of pushed and said, you know, there isn't you know, there isn't npe doesn't exist You know, there are no bad rules bad players Like I was being flippant But there is a sense in which like when you have the appropriate expectations, you know what you're about to experience Um, it generally I don't experience it as a feel bad Yeah, that's fair No, I honestly this was higher than I thought I expected this to be like maybe 10% You know, if you would have asked me Right, uh, what the who would have answered no so there are uh It what that says to me is that a couple of different again, I can't you know, I I can't understand the why of it, right But I can I can make guesses so And the the easiest explanation to me and again, this is just me constructing a narrative There's no data to support this other than that's quite a high number of people who literally in two years haven't played it I haven't experienced. Sorry. I haven't experienced npe Is one most people probably don't play that much Okay, like majority of players probably play once a quarter once every six months, especially in the Covid times of the last year. That's why I extended it to two years, right? Because that included the 13 months of non uh, non lockdown and So my thought is one people might not play that much two A lot of people probably play only with their friends or their friend groups of their club And in those clubs there's often an understanding of the types of games and things that they expect And so they just kind of self-regulate Right And so these are people who just have a good group or have a good group of friends or Don't happen to play some of the more busted armies by luck or or intent Right, right, right and I you know because it's When you look at this What that said to me is there's plenty of npe that happens. I think we can all that seems prima facie obvious That's why I'm doing this survey, right? Right, but I was pretty happy with this spread Because overall I felt like okay, that's decent You know three out of ten people have an experienced npe at all who are playing at all That's not bad That's pretty good Yeah, it's like I'd want that to be even higher like in a perfect world. I would want that to be flipped Right, I would want those two percentages inverted, but given the state of the game as I perceived it Uh, I was actually surprised. This was this good. So Had any rate Uh, let's talk about So now it's time to start digging into the cross tabs Let's get into them cross tabs, baby so tom This slide I love this slide so much. Okay. Yeah This slide is npe experienced by army. So this is the former question At the thing we just asked. We know the aggregate is 71 29 basically, right? Yeah But how does it how does it scale? relative to what army you're playing Exactly, okay So this is the percentage of people by army that have not Had npe So in other words this end of the chart the low end of the chart means More people who play that army have had npe have had a negative play experience The upper end of the chart means less Okay, and remember your median line Like your baseline sits right here Right in between 28.48 and 29.52 in between night hot and oscear phone reefers. Yeah, right That's your median line okay so This is such a fascinating list to me. Okay. Who's down at the bottom? Who's who is experiencing the most npe? Who feels like they're experiencing it the most Ogre Maw tribes the army without tricks Right By the way, when we get into cross tabs later and we're looking at the particulars You're gonna see in everyone. It's like ogres ogres ogres highest hate this hate that hate the next thing Because everybody else has tricks and they don't get any right Um silveneth again pretty understandable, right because it's just like They're they're in their new form. They're so susceptible to so many of these things beasts Again completely unsurprising and then It then heat nights, which doesn't surprise me because it is such a one dimensional army, right? It has like one way it's played one thing it does and as we always said it's very susceptible to like Armor to shooting to yeah to a bunch of stuff, right? There's one anomaly down here that is really curious to me. Oh, then we get into a couple weird ones Which is i'dneth and fire slayers, which I love these two showing up Like i'dneth the gatekeeper of gatekeeper armies that abuses the activation wars That stops and the shooting line of sight. Yeah, and can also alpha strike Right, but these people these fish people are just bad experiences Like are they just entitled to think they're supposed to win what what is the reason for that? Because I think that they have some fundamental Like so I would actually say that when we look at things like Heedonites i'dneth fire slayers glumes fight That those that stretch of four at least I would say that there is there are design issues In the functions of the armies themselves Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sure. Like that there are there are structural issues In units and in gaps in the army itself That can't be short up that mpe gets exploited Yeah, and so just let me answer a couple quick comments So max b npe for some may mean I lost I tried as hard as I could Through the phrasing of the question through what I had people identify through like everything I could to say It's not about losing or a bad player. Now again, you're right. Some people may take it like that I can't control what's in people's brains, but I can say I really worked to make this survey Not measure that I suspect that it it corresponds very heavily with games people lost But what I would add to that is it's also it's not often that you lose. It's how you lose Sure. Yeah. Yeah. No, I you can have npe in a game you win And you can have npe in a game you lose. They're they're not they're not directly related, right? They're not they're not really the same thing Yeah Uh, let's talk about those folks over on the right tom. Shall we are what we call the chill group? Right. Well, I gotta talk good the games games in a great spot So so when I look at daughter's seraphon cities, I'm like, yeah, that checks out As somebody said the armies on the right play in more phases often, which I agree like seraphon and cities are both play in every phase Million scrolls can build a hundred armies can handle any situation have some way to exploit every kind of npe rule, right? Basically Yep, right And so it kind of makes sense that they're the two least bothered by this that doesn't surprise me Right. Yeah, with daughters being able to often just weather everything Right. Yeah, daughters just bustle through it. Yeah, they blend through it. Yeah, yeah The one that really shocked me Was blades of corn hitting above the benchmark now not much You're like, it's fine. We'll figure it out. We get to punch stuff Look corn is just laid back. What this tells me is if you're a corn player You're just a laid back person. You're like, whatever I'm just here to Do you know what I rest that on tom? Like again, this is complete conjecture Complete conjecture. Do you know what I rest that that score on? uh Blood type Right because you're like, you know what I lost something but I get a point exactly Corn is this one time they really explored the design phase the design space that you know I love where you win something for losing Right Right, and it's so fascinating the Powerful like dopamine hit that comes from getting a blood point when when a unit's destroyed yours or an enemies right right, and I wish they would realize what a powerful tool they have in that And figure out some other interesting ways to design that sort of thing Right. Yeah, because I'm not sure that's what it is But I'll tell you that you know, we have a regular corn player in in my club who plays that army a lot And like he loses units and he's like, oh man Oh blood point and he just like you can I can watch him get sad and then happy Right. He bounces right right back. I have Yeah, I have a friend who plays corn here at a local our local club And it was fun watching him at in our recent game like he was just uh, it was a four player Kind of like multiplayer teams And I we just Eiffel towered him sure and it uh and he Like it was a rough game. It was a rough go of it But you know what he enjoyed doing summoning bloodthirsters. Absolutely. That's what I'm saying, man. Yes so Yeah, it's just like the The I don't know if it's the narrative of corn the people who tend to play corn The design of corn and getting the blood points. I don't know what it is, but they are an outlier on this, right? Yeah, yeah, so I thought that was interesting Uh, yeah, I just thought this was a fascinating chart. It's cool that there's like a 13 point spread and uh, like which is a pretty meaningful distribution, right? Yeah, yeah, and uh, what it tells me there is that If you're one of the bottom armies Like if you're maw tribe silvanathan beasts the fact that you have no tricks Means that you feel it all the more when other people have tricks And what I would say is the next four means is if there are meaningful holes in your lineup that can be exploited You feel that yes, you feel that right truck. It's like I I see like fire slayers And I'm just like oh somebody's been hit by the mobility tricks Paul I'm a corn player who accepts they will lose most games, but demons are still cool Yeah, see there you go. That's corn player right there. I just think corn players are cool people I think that's what it is. I mean, that's probably that that tracks All right Good stuff. This one that was that that was a fun cross tabs experiment. I like that one Uh, okay, so now let's get into the npe factors All right, so I had this fascinating. Yeah, this one is here's where we get into the goods We're getting into that juice that juicy juice Okay Uh, oh so uh red wizard said i'm surprised knight hawn isn't lower I again think people who play knight hawn just love playing knight hawn They're so high The army is highly played again going back to the earliest things. It was one of the top played armies I think people just love those ghosts I love playing knight hawn. I do but I like winning more there All right, so let's talk about nbe factors Okay, uh, like so like can I can I go? Yeah, you go with knight hawn Um, when I thought about what I'm taking this weekend to play all weekend with vents I consider just taking knight hawn that tracks Because it's fun Mm-hmm, like and that's what I want to do. I want to just go have fun so I think that's totally fine All right, let's talk about the ranking of npe factors. Here we go. This is what let's get into the juice of it folks I did not expect this to be the spread tom did so let me ask this question No, did you it's like what on this list surprises you? I mean everybody can see the numbers on the screen What on this list surprises you? um That hot that high rend was number two uh from the bottom Yeah, nobody cares about rend Yep, uh, and that uh, I expected that the hit and wound debuffs would be higher Yeah, I had a lot of surprises in this Okay, because you know what I hate I know what you hate what I hate a whole bunch of dice and not doing anything Exactly, right? so so You look here high amounts of dice rolling, you know toward the bottom middle at only 16 percent Hit and wound debuffs neg one neg two neg three next one up above that feel no pain Uh rolls and that kind of thing Still again low high armor saves or something. I hate You know was the highest one out of the things. I really hate Okay Yeah, this section is like what I picked. This is my Be it not insta kill. Sorry this section right here Because to me I just hate rolling dice and nothing happening like I play this game because I want stuff to happen And I learned that I've got some friends, but we're not the most popular group We thought we were the cool kids. We were not Activation wars way out above by far the highest one Yeah, it's horrible nuance on that later actually So it's funny that you say that because when I when I was singing through like what my like on the yes no split The only thing I had to really consider was activation wars. Yeah Like when all the rest of these whatever But activation wars were the ones that I went Okay, like these were bad experiences, but what I categorize them as like Negative play experiences like things that like just really like Crushed me and I'm like no like I knew it was coming in all those instances. And so I just play it accordingly Yep, yeah, and so Here's here's what's interesting to me activation wars clearly the top next up magical dominance Then shooting and then turn one alpha strikes the turn one alpha strikes surprised the heck out of me Because I real I like I don't care at all. I love when people alpha strike me at the top of one That's like my favorite thing in the world because every army I've ever built and played is ready for a turn one alpha strike Right Like I always have trap walls. I always have some Yeah, because you're used to playing me I just it's just how I think about the game Right like deployment is absolutely something I don't list writing You know, I don't invest a huge amount of time in but things like deployment. I think about deeply Right. Yeah. Yeah And so to me it's never been a thing like when's the last time tom you saw me just set my army up on a line That has literally never happened. Okay No, no It's just I see people do it In in battle reports or whatever and I'm like, what are you doing? Why are your troops on that? Where's your chaff walls? Where's your second chaff wall? Where's your three inch thing? So if somebody comes into you It blows up your first chaff wall somehow gets into the second one and then piles through and attacks a second time And they can pile six inches into your line. You're still protected. What are you doing with yourself? like Which is what what what hurt my corn plier when I talked about that double game Was that he set up on the line And then went first and I went Okay, everything's in shooting range Yeah, so what's what's interesting about it to me is I always think of alpha strikes as being a fairly deploy counterable thing right, yeah, I agree. I agree and I like I never alpha strike people I would never do it because I think it's an absolute like super great way to lose a game I think it's generally a stupid way to play to make an army that like unless somebody leaves the door open In such an obvious way that I can literally get in there and win the game on turn one for sure You can't not You can't not shove your army down the shirt If they yeah, if they like if they do just if they have the dumbest deployment ever and I'm like, okay Well, I guess I'll just win at the top of one Fine, yeah, right. Yeah, but in general I find turn one alpha strikes to be basically a way to auto lose and So it has no appeal to me as a strategy. I find it to generally be a losing strategy and uh the The whole concept of it. It was fascinating to me that it rated so highly They're like and and what that tells me is I think that there's a like a knowledge gap. I was under appreciating And I'm I'm just saying like I I think there's a lot of people who don't think in terms of like Well, this is how I have to castle and shaft my lines and have units that push out and On average, I win my first three games in an event not because I'm good But because I just know the game Yeah, sure Like like I know what things do and and and how to set appropriate ranges and set up and like News flash folks like gi joe is right Yeah, sure knowledge is like the battle. Yeah, at least Yeah, knowledge is half the battle possibly even more sure No, I agree And so it you know what matthew varley just said in the chat It takes experience to know how to deploy to prevent turn one alpha strikes people who are playing maybe one or two times a year Aren't doing that. Yeah, and I agree. That's what I'm saying. I think I was under appreciating that So I think matt's dead on there, right? I think that that kind of knowledge of Critical deployment is an undervalued Skill set because you can't look in a book and learn that No, that's not a rule you can learn in a book. Yeah Right Okay, so what's that? So at any rate, then I have the what makes npe. This is a later question But I brought it up here because overwhelmingly overwhelmingly The thing that won this I did again. This surprised me that this was this strong Right like this won the election in a landslide Was the mechanic reduces interactivity in the game With 68 percent of the respondents answering that as being the reason what that is Everybody ain't not getting to do anything. Right and when you look at it through that lens It becomes much more clear. I did find the difference between activation wars Which is the ability to fight first or make others fight last Right, which but by the way that is reducing interactivity 100 because what they're doing is they're taking away I would even say it goes one step deeper than interactivity It's about changing expectations of how the game functions. Sure. Sure It's it's reducing your interactivity in a way that just doesn't feel like how the game is supposed to play Right, right. Yeah, but it was fascinating to me the the pretty big difference, right almost a In fact more than I'm sorry a 20 point difference between activation wars and multiple fighting Yep, right. So if you fight twice but in order Right where you like you have an ability to activate again, but it's in some kind of order Yeah Or you fight during the hero phase or something in some kind of like writing out a phase. Yeah Yeah, people seem to mind that much much less Like that ranked below high armor saves high mortal wounds and everything else we mentioned already Yeah, it's basically in the middle of the distribution Right So it's fascinating to me that like that space is okay whereas The Yeah, it's more. Okay. You're right. It's more. Okay more accepted. It should be the right way to say that, right Whereas the activation wars were so negative Let's talk about the stuff at the bottom because I want I want this to lead into a discussion tom about about the nature of answering this question Yeah So at the bottom of the chart, we have high damage melee with almost nobody caring about it damage debuffs Almost nobody caring about it objective control mechanics like like ogres and sons of bet have not basically nobody high rend That's a big winner and bravery debuffs Okay, which was the absolute loser. I mean bravery debuffs is so far at the bottom People just don't care Now let's talk about what this means Because this is interesting stuff to me I also love by the way the instant kill effects Did you rank so low and then we didn't have model restoration. Did we uh, no, I did not do model restoration Um, I that was one thing that I missed that I I asked a bunch of people Nobody gave me that one and in my own list. I didn't think of it. It would have been a good one Well, I mean mechanically it's not as prevalent as it used to be Like before when legions of negash were there and they're putting the whole units back on the table Back when they're you're putting like three snakes back onto a unit of six every turn Like that's very different. Yeah So let's talk about the because this leads to a really interesting set of of concerns. Okay By the way, I love that movement debuffs ranked so low when to me like that is one of the absolute killers of how to win a game Right, I guess we all just How many how many movement debuffs are there really in the game? A decent ish number, but that's leading into exactly what I want to say You're you're you're hitting right on what I was going to get at Okay, there are multiple possibilities as to why things are low on this list Okay Possibility one people truly don't care Okay, like that is to say they really don't consider it a negative play experience Right, that's one. That's one possibility Option two frequency bias Right, it occurs so rarely That people just haven't experienced it enough to mine Right or like it hasn't it hasn't popped up on their radar as something. That's just like too Too dominant like something can be good without being a winning strategy. Sure Option three is it exists in any number? But has no impact on your overall play experience because of other mitigating factors Okay, sure, and I'll I'll two of these falls squarely into that category. Here's the first one damage debuffs Like there are things that debuff your damage not a lot of them But there are some but the fact that all of them cap out, you know minus one damage or something to a minimum of one right Means in general like who cares because most damage values in the game are one Right So it's like, okay, that's you've got a neat trick there, but to most of the time. I don't care Yeah Yep bravery debuffs exist in the game like everywhere just everywhere, right Yeah as uh, ben saw the exploited at a recent event sure I mean like I think dark writers cause neg one bravery like really whatever, you know, just like everybody does this You know But who cares Right because battle shock is so mitigatable right that Uh You you just are like, yeah, whatever Right like okay up Um, so you've got like this. So you've got these three Different things that can all get in each other's business, right? You can have a mix of those three. That's not independent And I think the why why I say that's interesting is because here's my question tom Should they be pushing more into this design space like we got to give somebody special we got to give people special abilities right This can't just be rolling dice to each other Well, I mean so like let me just let's look at the sampling of what we have here. Um Let's talk morale bravery debuffs. Okay, sure Inherently bravery debuffs do nothing Yep, agree inherently like they functionally do nothing to the game Yes, they only have it. They only have an effect around the margins Right, right. So they only have an effect when you have to make a battle shock Which is something that Really doesn't happen if you don't want it to in this game Like if you have large units you can save command points in order to deal with the situation Um, or you can include units that make you battle shock immune passively Or the enemy is running things that trigger mortal wounds on on on Uh against bravery check Which would be something like banshees or vargais or you know, like all of that stuff Yep, the death stuff that would trigger that or Yeah, and in general that's just fairly rare lumeneth or another exception to this because they can push this so extreme um but It's just it's not I would say what it it is not a winning tactic and definitely not against things like uh, ocear Yep, sure who are just immune to battle shock is an army. Yeah, right and so like for me when I read that one That one is just not real Like it's not the thing the thing isn't the problem. It's that thing when combined with other stuff And so the experience of the negative isn't the problem. It's that when comboed out with other stuff Sure. So let me ask you a question. Tom high armor Is the number six overall? I know I hate it right Yep, and high rend Nobody seems to mind So is one of the fixes to the game Just add rend to a lot of armies where it should be like up the average rend by let's call it one point across the board It would speed up games Like I think it was a really interesting set of sort of findings here because what ultimately Go ahead You know, you don't add it to okay shooting Sure, sure. Yeah. Yeah If shooting stayed if shooting dropped a point of rend on average, right? And melee went up a point of rend on average. How much of the game's npe do we solve right there? Weird right Uh, so that's it's just like that occurred to me when I saw those two mirror each other like that, right I'm like, huh, I'll low and a high. Yeah, that's really interesting. Right. Yeah So I mean what I would say is that some of it is meaningful like the objective based stuff It's only it's so infrequent that you see that And then even then like most of those giants aren't or most of the ogres aren't snaking objectives from 30 man units Mm-hmm Right like they can edge shoot the you know the the stuff guarded by five or ten models, but not You know, so like Some of this it just moves a lot of these Experiences into real corner case encounters so that even if you encounter this army, it doesn't always dominate the exchange Yeah, what I take from this chart plus the what makes npe combination, right? Yeah Uh, yeah, and I agree with Rodney R who says more rend would make dice rolls do more and more often Yeah, I agree with that right like because it sucks when you roll a bunch of dice and then the people like I saved all of them Okay, well that was cool But what gw really needs to pay attention to In their design is they need to seriously ask the question Are we reducing the interactivity of the game by what we're doing here? right, right And shooting is always going to be a stickler Right, right because it is inherently a one-sided Uh encounter right and it has to be there Which by the way, I wonder if you moved towards A kill team asks shooting phase An alternate shooting phase. Can you go back and forth shooting? Yeah, if that would if that would change the experience or is it just because some armies have it and some armies don't Because like I think about because the reason why I bring this up is I think about something like um, like the double turn sure Imagine the shooting phase double turn Like imagine how that would be mitigated if you get to shoot back during their shooting phases sure I mean, it would have so many cascading consequences into how you'd need to think about stuff and It would need a core it needs a core rules redesign like what I'm proposing is like something for an addition change It's not something for the world where it yeah, but you still have the number two thing on the list Which is the mechanic is not evenly distributed, right? There there's definitely a grasses greener syndrome here to some cases, which is by the way not unfair When you know, we mentioned earlier that you've got armies like Uh, you know, you've got armies like ogres and people like that. They just really don't have the bag of tricks Right, um because They you know, they don't get access to any of this special crap Like when you look down this list or like shooting. Nope. Nope. Nope Maybe Nope You know just on and on right. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope Just you know, repeatedly they can they're not getting this stuff, right? And so same with suns by the way Yeah, and uh, so there's definitely this inequity that's there at the same time, right? um So I you know I think that the the most important thing we can harvest for this from this is the following like here would be my summation of this data One the activation wars is pure poison Yeah, okay Period two redesign bottom up. Yeah two and by the way I think part of that is also like let's let's reimagine the activation wars if we can't hear tom, okay Like let's get rid of the fight last portion of this and just think about fight first for a moment Yep, imagine if the most powerful unit that ever had Strikes first always strikes first or whatever Was the slaves to darkness demon prince Sure, okay, imagine that was literally the best model with that ability Sure, would this ability what would that have ranked so high? No, of course. I don't think it would have even come close. You don't have Like what you don't have is this I charge your hearth guard unit and then get whatever I attack with deleted and then They pile into something else and delete it right right Yeah, when you've got hearth guard berserkers doing it when you've got cool kings on terror guys doing it We used to have them on like and i'm describing about like Being attacked when you charge Yeah, yeah, I get it You're charging them and then you die and then they kill something else as well. Yeah, right suddenly We're playing like magic and they have first strike and you're like when did this happen? They have double strike as a matter of fact. Yes. Well, no that the hearth guards have double strike. Yes, right? Yes, like and but that's the problem is that like You don't ever get to reprisal I mean how much how much would some of this have been solved by and I know that this this may exacerbate the issue But allowing you people to like activate first when they charge or something Yeah, I know that I know that adds a bunch of like it adds it to everybody Sure But it suddenly makes charging a whole lot more important It does Uh, I mean you get a lot more tail in right people would tail in other units a lot more So Here's here's Two quick thoughts on there three quick thoughts on this I guess. Yeah one the activation wars are pure poison as I said Fortunately, that's been getting weeded out of the game Right. It's it's a lot less Prevalent now than it was in 2019 Right. Yep. It's being send out certainly Two magical dominance is not far behind in how much people hate it and they have hit that button a lot lately Okay, so reverse course You're going the wrong direction on that that's got to be we got to back that out right right three They need to think about interactivity deeply and how shooting actually should be working in this game Who can shoot how much you can shoot What it the ability is like because that a very common response in the in the verbatims Was stuff like I don't like having my character sniped Right Which makes sense? You have these five wound heroes and they just get sniped out But at the same time the game has to have the ability to snipe out characters Like some kind of pressure valve on that because otherwise what you get is death star armies Yep, you get her to scarber zerker clouds You get her to scarber zerker clouds and doc like the preeminence of doc was because no one could just snipe out their characters Right. It was great. Yeah. I mean, that's what that is if you can't go away a five and a queen on a five It came along. Well, it was so fascinating that like Skaven actually had a solution to some of that And so, you know like we have to have some amount of shooting That actually can kill these characters like these characters need to be able to die. I know it sucks sometimes But look you think seraphon is bad now Imagine seraphon in the world where you can't kill those little skink priests Okay, I want you to think about the nightmare that that is We're just at will every round. They're always making a unit Mortal on sixes and do everything else they need to do and every other stupid buff they can add Right and there's no removing them and there's no removing them Right Like seraphon would shoot to like 80% win rate over their current nonsense Right They'd get more broke. It's is unremovable. Right so like The the problem is is that It really like things that are bad things that are the worst Are now that being said it still shouldn't be so easy either, right? Like the line here seems to be I'm not saying it should just be easy to blow away characters I'm saying it has to be doable, but there needs to be a better like Costing to it probably Yeah Risk reward Investiture of amount of stuff it takes to get them off Like something like that when you look at croak or somebody like that just spamming big mortal wound bombs and incidentally blowing away characters your mini characters, right? Or OBR catapults just being like ha ha boom boom. There you go. Take that. I just killed you know All of your five wound characters are dead in a round Right, right, right Yep, so like That's Where it and by the way, I agree that seraphon is also explains this problem That's what I'm talking about now just to respond to Eric in the comments I'm saying they would get even like they would get even worse if it got harder through targeted shooting to remove characters What I'm saying is the We certainly shouldn't be killing these people through incidental area of effects splash Garbage That can just wipe out all their characters, right? That's the worst and the idea that like You you should be able to kill them, but it should represent some investment like instead of you know really hitting their unit that has 20 30 40 people in it You invest about that amount of firepower into killing this character, right and that you get what I'm saying There needs to be a better balance in what you have to invest to pull it off right And so the the other thing that occurs to me is The armies that are clearly at the top of the meta are the armies that exploit multiples of these at the same time I'm sure sure I think in a lot of the verbatims what I saw is that people can stand one of these things When units start doing multiple of these things simultaneously Right When they fight first and fight twice and can alpha strike you it's like And have aftersaves right it's like get out of here and do high mortal wounds Right and oh wait, where are we at right? Well, we're we're on the gulking on And and have and have minuses to be wounded Yeah, yeah, like sorry. I'm just I'm just articulating my uh the center of my fire slider army Oh, sorry. Yes So like not so not only do they have to think okay is the mechanic we're writing reducing interactivity They have to think okay We know these things are generally perceived as negative like these are powerful abilities. We're handing out right Or we need to make sure we don't give multiple doses of this to one army group hero unit whatever right, especially a power piece in its own right already That's when things get off the rail. It's not the rails It's not that one of these things is happening individually and is poisoning the game because if that was the case People would have said the mechanic in itself is always bad Yeah, right, but instead that was the lowest response It's when these things start stacking Because the cumulative the the it's the hole is greater than the sum of its parts In that case, right So This one was really interesting. I mean, I know we spent a long time on the slide, but I think it be hoops it Yeah, totally Because this was a real revelation to me. I think that I like I I hope Gw watches this and I hope they look at this slide and really think deeply about all this stuff Right, right because when you read the verbatims, do you know how many of those verbatims broke my heart? Like there are some that really like legitimately made me sad Okay Yeah, because I read them and they're like and some of them not all of them, but some of the verbatims like Whatever a few it doesn't matter some number x Yep, we're like I played the game This thing happened and I just couldn't take it anymore. So I stepped away from the game and I'm like Or I've played a game since yeah, that's like a dagger in my heart. I mean, I really mean that like I felt so pained Reading that because I love this game And I want it to be great and hearing people say that Literally hurts me Okay And so I do hope that they think about these things seriously Because yes, you're affecting people at the margins, but you're that's you're losing people for no reason Right, you didn't need to lose those people So there you go Okay, let's keep going Negative play experience by army. Let's dig into the by army cross tab. Here we go Uh, okay. So this is this was a fun This is something I completely made up, but I'm happy about it All right, tom. This is my army npe sentiment average Here's what I mean by that So this is a factor of the number of respondents who say they said they played that army Normalized over their number of selections Sure. Do you understand what I mean? I do. So It's the relationship between the army itself and how many buttons they collect for npe. Yes, exactly right. That's right Yep. Yeah, so So how complaining an army is yes, we we I call this the butthurt scale. Yes, that's right. This is the winer scale Okay, so they have awesome stuff and they have awesome stuff and they have awesome stuff. Yes Okay, so people at the left side of the chart over here clicked more buttons, right on average Yeah, they've more they found more things Within the scope of the list to be npe people on this side found less things on average And remember this is averaged over hundreds of people, right? So which is this there's so much fascinating data here There really is Okay, like the most fascinating piece of data is the winner. What? Yeah, seraphon. What? What are you complaining about? When I count this out and saw that the most complaining army were the people who play seraphon right You know what that says to me your opinion doesn't matter anymore go sit in the corner I was like what in all that is holy hold on. I want to I want to address a comment real quick Hey, jazz, I saw your comment there about uh I I I have to tell you I don't play but from what I've seen with balance I probably would not for a game of cost as much. I would expect a lot of balancing So Here's what I'll say. This is a deep dive into a fairly negative sentiment, right? Because we're talking about the the bad parts of the game This is one experience over two years, right? Remember this is one exactly. That's the the level here Most games I have of this most games I play of this game I play every week are so fun and so perfect and like Legitimately, I there's nothing else I do in a week other than my dd game that I look forward to more So please don't take this all as being blown up as more than it is This is an exploration of how we take a good even maybe a great game and make it even better That's all it is Uh, I would if you find a good group of good people You're gonna have nothing but fun when you sit down at the table. I promise So I just I wanted to address that I I mentioned earlier But it's it's worth it bears repeating right because it's easy when we dig into this to To get swept up in the negative and feel like we're stuck on that Yeah, no, okay. That's fair. So that the only thing I could think of with the serif on players is that they're literally self answering All right, sure. I mean you're like They're like, well people hate when we do this, right? We're broken. We pick all the things we're broken with Like are they answering the question them for in light of their own army? Right Yeah The next ones are all exactly what I expected like sylvaneth ogre's heat knights. Yeah, sure again. Yep Exactly what I expected um The other end of the list is our cool guy end of the list, right And there was a clear winner here by the by clear winner Ossiarch bone reapers players apparently obr. They got a couple things that are bothering them, but for the most part you're fine They're almost a full point better than they're upon They're sad that they don't get to activate first, but whatever they can most of the time weather it They're the most chill Yes Uh, so like this one was interesting because this was sort of like um This was just a calculation that was an interesting convergence from the data right as I normalized this out That I thought was fun. I don't know that I have many conclusions to draw from this. I just thought it was It's just fascinating. Yeah, by the way the number of these charts. Yeah, by the way, this isn't every army I ran these for some not all. Yeah fireslayer doesn't show up on a bunch of these Yeah, like if they were really low data Some of them I didn't run because I didn't feel like we'd be at statistical significance You know, some of them I didn't put everyone in here. It's going to skew the ends. Yeah, exactly Uh at any rate, so yeah, I mean not every one of these has every single army run for because I had to like manually Do a bunch of Stuff to calc every one of these out So like I left lumineth and suns and fireslayers off of a lot of these because they were So low on their responses and on their newness. I'm not sure it felt Good to answer at any rate the number of lists that scaven end up in the middle Of are really funny. They're just like Skaven when they initially came out they were busted, but it was purely because of points Right, it wasn't actually because of what they did or how they played for the most part Their points got adjusted and now they're just like they are captain middle of the road Well, you know, I think a big piece of that is though. I think that there's a I think there's an explanation for the part of that at least Um, I really think a big piece of that has to do with the fact that like Skaven is such a big army There's so many permutations of what that army is sure that like there's like Playing a pestilence army is not the same as playing a Like a mixed arms hardest nails scaven less sure taking a flesh-milled menagerie and going nuts or taking a big work called Convocation or whatever right? Yeah, like it's it is an army that has a million faces, which is great much like the horned rat himself Okay, cool. Uh, let's keep digging into this Uh, so here we get into the individual npe factors by type army. So again, we're down in the cross tabs here Uh, this is an interesting so so this whole section. Here's what we're doing because we're gonna have lots of these What we're doing is i'm taking a single type of npe Right Yep, and we're saying The people who played that army right What was their overall Selection of it right like how much are they selecting? How did people how did any one specific army? Uh React to certain types of npe right exactly. Yep so this one's fascinating because My my the reason I wanted to dig into the cross tabs on this was because I wanted to see if people were We're honest with themselves Okay, I don't know how else to say it Like if you are playing an army that wins by exploiting a particular type of npe Right Do you less frequently select that thing? Okay Yep And the answer is Yes sort of Right, right. You have to be like really exploiting it For it to the most for the most part to have for it to have an effect and even then it's not as strong as I was expecting Okay, so when I look at this. Yeah, I want to be like what ko are complaining about the activation wars What's wrong in your life that you're complaining about the activation wars in ko Well, the answer is quite a lot actually Right, which is hilarious to me because What are you doing with your life? You're not killing anything in melee anyways Stop it A lot of people play in ending rigors. I guess They're not They're not I don't know what to tell you about that's not what the data says We have data on those things. Sure So the people who hate the activation wars the least Yeah Yep, are obviously the armies that benefit from it the most which is Tricks Heatnights being way lower than everybody else like an obvious standout followed very closely behind by fresh eater cords No, they're fine. Yeah But even then how Like it's funny to me how many slanesh players were either thinking of their own army and being like yeah, that's bad Right Like they exploit it and don't like it That's the only like that because that's part of the reason why the number could be pushed up so high Right, they could be answering and going. Yes. I know it's bad. I do it But I don't like it either You know, they could have sort of an attic syndrome, right? Yeah, uh and You know and then flesh eaters and idk Uh oryx was a fascinating one to me because You know the war clients don't really exploit the activation wars per se I guess we could count smashing and bashing probably Yeah, but you know, I don't consider that like the activation wars in the same way Because it's not reliable like one of the big things in competitive players reliability when smashing and bashing happens like it You it it can sometimes be planned for Um, but sometimes it's a throw of the dice That's very different than my I spend a command point and I always strike first sure Over on the right side of the chart. We find the armies that hate the activation wars the most Uh, which is stormcast cities and bone reefers with bone reefers standing out a pretty significant chunk above everybody else Like again, because all these are very normalized like even a half is meaningful Why do they keep it? It goes first I guess that's it. I was like, all right. I this is like the obr players were pretty chill Remember right on the last slide the obr players were like the chillest group. Do we get one f bomb? But yes, they were like, yes, they weren't you just say this way they were like f this thing in particular Right. Yes, everything's cool activation wars. You're out this one thing yeah, uh Yeah, so it was it was funny to me that that that's how that's spread out things like the daughters hating it was I suppose interesting Um Who's that don't get it? Yeah, I guess is that just envy like is that just it's not evenly distributed? I mean they have multiple fighting They just don't have activation wars fighting, right? So yeah Right. So when people go into their witches like if they get forced last by slanage, they don't have a reprisal They just go like sure Yeah, the the but this chart mostly spread out how I expected it to Right, like storm cast being up top not surprising at all to me, right? So on and so forth It actually surprised me that ogres were so middle of the the road on this one um There's a lot of them where they're not This one they're kind of dead center Uh, which was surprising. Uh, that's not that's not actually common amongst this list Uh, as we as we get into them So, yeah, okay cool. So the activation war is percentage wise You'll notice they're gonna be higher than a lot of the other percentages we look at because again They were it was the most frequently selected thing, right? Uh, all right Next one high armor saves This one. I love tom. I love high armor saves so much because you know this one I have a like I have an absolute. Here's what's so funny about this chart tom You know that high armor saves are quite literally One of the two things I hate most in the game, right? And if you look at to the right of the chart, you'll see all events as armies Yep There they are Just like the two highest these towers over the rest of the chart Well, three There's three of your armies are all all grouping to the right Yeah, yeah, uh, which let me just other than gloom spike gets you have all of the top seven armies Like let me point that out. Yeah, yeah, skaven seraphon beast daughters heat knight worklands Yep And even ogre's sorry eight Yep Seems a map So it like I I was glad to see that whatever the psychographic profile is that I have that there are others like me, right? That that I that yes, there's some reasoning At the subconscious level behind my hatred and that others are in this milieu with me, right? Uh, so I enjoyed that. I thought that was very funny Yeah, when I saw this particular chart, I was like, oh well, there you go. Okay And I see storm cast and they're like, uh, we'll use our star soul maces, right? Yeah, I mean storm cast are just like, no, no, this is our thing. Shut up. Get away. Don't you touch it Don't you touch our only thing? We have a thing we do leave us alone. Yeah, absolutely You know, again, the left side of this chart very predictable storm cast Aussi arc, uh, sylvanas doesn't surprise me probably mainly on the back of things like current author or something like that Or a lot of people or or their heroes we can get to so low saves um Not to mention the fact kernauth in both directions, right that kernauth can often be rather tough Uh, and also the fact that they have a pretty decent access to like neg2 rend and stuff like that. Yeah I'll call it decent. I don't want to say They've had the nergal buff. Yep. They can uh, they can nergal buff. Yeah, they can nergal buff. Yeah, exactly cities again Similarly, you can you can often end up with some crazy armor saves in cities with stuff like tempest eye and things like that You know, this is my uh 40 block of dwarven Iron breakers or whatever that are on a two up save, you know that I can make reroll ones in round one. So okay Uh, yeah, so I mean very clear standouts here in the heat knights and oryx both of whom are almost completely melee only armies, right like that's it. They have no other tricks. There's like Right two shooting attacks in those armies combined, right? Yep, and They almost across the board have neg1 rend Yeah, yep, like there's very little run zero super defense. Yeah in in in that army, but everything is just rend one Yep Right. Yep So it just like anytime armor drifts above four plus they just aren't going to crack the egg Right, right Okay, uh magical dominance so um This is a funny chart because Tom I would not have guessed in a million years Who magical dominance bothered the least? Really? Yeah, the least Like I daughters aren't playing in the spell dom game Right, right. That's the point. They're like like they're like, wait, let me get this right You cast spells really well and you shut other casters down Cool, I'll take my five up rerollable. Let's do this. Yeah, I guess and I'll have you in the throat Like I guess it's because they have prayers and they don't really need their only one spell that they actually care about for the most part All right, so wait, let me get this straight all of my magic still works I have a resistance against all of your magic and I stab people in the throat really well. Got it. Sure I just wouldn't have guessed them to be literally the lowest, right? I would have assumed that that side of the board was going to be like Seraphon Disciples Well, you know what this does You know what they say when they see in the spelldom meta? They're like Cool. I get 140 more points. Yeah, sure. Sure Yeah, because I'll just like I'm not going to dedicate a wizard To this anymore. I'm going to give it to Marathi And I'm going to spend that dedicated spot on other units. Yeah Yeah, because they still have a good enough caster and Marathi to get the job done Um, and then it just becomes icing and never be like you don't require the the murder the murder buff Yeah On the opposite side of the chart It's very funny to me because it's a mix of armies that like really want their spells to do stuff Right like they have decent spells that they need to to to get off to actually make the army kind of function And that don't generally have any more than like a couple buffs here or there to cast Right or ogres and gets And where they just Gets and can't get there. Yeah, here's what's funny about that the top three armies All have some kind of access To plus one to cast pretty pretty natively and really good spell like good spells that do real work Right, and they're like in skaven's case who were way out above everybody else, right? Um You have the reality that they you're paying for everything you have to be a double caster Right, right. So like you can gen up a lot of spells and again all three of these you're generally gonna You know, you can often operate with plus one because of the moon for the gits because of the cauldron for the ogres and because of the knoll hole for the Uh for the skaven, right? So all of them have like some kind of relatively decent access to plus one Yep And you know skaven can also obviously eat their magic rocks or whatever like there are ways to to push around their casting But none of their casting still equals what the spell doms can do Right, right. Not table-wide. They're not automatic. They're not plus four or whatever, right? Yeah, exactly And so it was just interesting to me that those three armies are all like They have some kind of magical ability not hot They all really want their spells and they all really get punished by being in a meta where they can't use those spells Right again I love the carotid overlords. We're like, man, I hate this. I hate this thing and I'm just like, come on guys Shoot the wizards. I don't know I mean And and and You that endless spell that you're gonna drop your warp fire or your warp your your low warp lightning vortex Is gonna only last one round Like against the spell dom teklis is going to be like nope Right or or the lord change is gonna shoot it down automatically Yeah, I yeah, absolutely. I agree by the way with uh With joe mcgill who said in the comments, I am kind of surprised blades was as high as they were I was too. I guess because Like If they were more anti-magic They would be great But the problem is is you want to spend spell tie or you want to spend blood ties on more blood thirsters You don't want to spend spell tie on the spelling spells. Yeah, exactly And when you look at it, it's like, okay, well Sure, they have a lot of people who can dispel but what is that worth in a spell dom? How different would that army be? If like they just had a generic allegiance ability which is like Corn hates magic you get to throw unbinds at every spell Sure, sure. Sure. And I'll say they don't often have a ton of bonuses to their unbinds Like sometimes that you can get like that plus two right and even even their best trick Which is their skulls like the little hex forger skulls Yep Teclas is just like, oh, that's adorable. Look at that little cute. Look at those little cute things I cast on tens unmodifiable boom boom boom Right, right, right, right so Like I man that army would be so much better It was like so benefited by just giving them like a free unbind like corn unbinds of spells Well, you know just an unmodified, you know throw at the dice. Yeah It would it would do a lot for that army that is basically all melee anyways. Sure So this one was interesting. Let's go to the next one multiple fighting Uh who uh Yeah, I by the way, I agree with assistant rep who said, uh, sorry with with brendwood who said Zinchen slaves are back to back here, but not as low as I thought Uh night haunt just got sort of left out of this. That's that's actually an error on my part I'm sorry. I didn't bring the night hot and I should have I thought I got all the big ones But I realized I didn't again I had to put all this together manually out of a lot of pivot tables and stuff So I accidentally left off the ghosty boys. That was unintentional Tire slayers didn't make it either, but they're a low sample, but they were an intentional cut Yeah, all the the low and new could those were intentional. I thought I got all the ones that weren't that I just actually left the ghosts out of some of these So I'm sorry. Like I said, I'll I'll publish out the data so people can take a look on their own if they want Um, okay multiple fighting Uh, I love that blades is way over on the left and they're just blades daughters Heed knights flesh eaters exactly the four that you would expect to be down there, right? This they're like, I don't see anything wrong with this. Yeah, the four armies who are like nap We're good with this. This is exactly where we're living, brother This is what we do Uh, so that that did not surprise normal cast making a surprising appearance down there Until you realize they're like, oh wait, high armor is our thing. Yeah, go ahead and you can attack twice Right, exactly. Yeah, I'm fine. Go ahead roll your dice waste your time. Yeah, exactly Uh, and then over on the right side of the chart with uh, the people most bothered magikin, eidneth and mawtribes Sure Mawtribes not surprised me. They're way out on top and again, this is where they I know that like there's a big pain point for them Yep Blikings were like you get to do what? Yeah, sure I was surprised to see eidneth up here that they were like Obviously, I know they don't have any multiple fighting their their activation was people not multiple fighting and I just was very surprised that this bothered eidneth players that much I guess they don't like dying in the hero phase, but I You know, I don't know Well, they just want always strikes first. Well, I don't know that because that's that's activation words. That's not even this I don't know. Yeah, I this is what i'm saying. It's a complete mystery to me Yeah, they're they're the outlier that I cannot explain why idk players are this bothered by multiple fighting Well, they don't get it Yeah, I mean sure, but like they have a lot as we mentioned other than this They are the grab bag of npe tricks, right? Well, what I'll say is this I would suspect that idk one of the challenges that they have is like fighting eels then reprise zap And then them getting jammed by another unit that piles in that was out of range or something Yeah, like that. Yeah, exactly. So they lose a bunch of their strategic units in a phase that they can't do anything about right? Yeah, just No, it could be They also tend to have sort of a lower wound count. So losing things off phase where they have less ability to respond It could also be quite costly Um, so maybe that's why I don't know again I can I can like guess but it's hard to get a read on that one Some of these you look at and you're like yep makes total sense completely understand No question about it. Sometimes you get those outliers that are interesting Shooting armies We have a lot of slides to go buddy. Oh, yeah, there's so many Did somebody ask about the number of slides? No, but I was like, man, we're uh, we're solid, you know, two and a half hours in where we oh, man We got a lot of slides too. There's a lot of data There's a lot of data Okay, so npe factors by type uh or army by type and army. So yeah, so shooting armies again. Look at Who's the hell? I was like, I don't see anything here. Yeah, no problems here folks. Everything's fine Move along move along. How are you now? It's all good This is these are not the mechanics you're looking for. Yeah, I just I love how the Drop off on them at least what we can say is the KO players are honest, right? Yeah Yeah, at least they know what you're doing in other phases, but we get shooting leave us alone Yeah, like The one that surprises me by the buy down here at the bottom. So when I look at these I'm like It is I was like sure KO scaven silvaneth Okay, like all these armies you shooting to their advantage in some kind of cities way. Yeah cities exactly Yeah, I guess I guess orc war clients just don't care because you don't have enough time to shoot me until you're dead Like I'm gonna get to you first. So whatever I'm gonna I'm gonna charge across battlefield. I'm gonna hand and then charge Yeah, you know nothing's touching me But these players Being so okay with shooting an army that relies on five wound jank heroes that could just die from a stiff breeze It's fine I like We have clouds. I I don't know. I don't um, I don't know why I mean they have some shooting And don't they have unbore Raiders? Yeah, sure. You guys have like unbore Raiders, but I mean that's okay That's not It's not really powerhouse shooting Cygors throw rocks You got me on that one Yeah, I I'm surprised that magikin's not lower Yeah, I mean, it's pretty middle of the road all things considered, right? I guess it's because you know in the end There's a lot of after saves in magikin. There's a lot of negatives to To be Hit in shooting across that army Sure, but like I'm surprised like even idk who's going to ignore it through a line of sight blocking stuff Um, they're pretty middle of the road Yeah, I was actually quite surprised that they weren't lower that they were even they were even as high as they were being that they have Pretty much the best anti shooting tech in the game Right, right, right. I love how saraphon's like we need to do something about this shooting. It's a problem to our dumb hints The only thing that can actually minorly threaten us is long range shooting and the ability to Snipe out some of our or short medium range shooting. Yeah, that's all of these galamanders over here Obviously, we're fine. I wish those were clearly fine. That's how we're talking about Yes, I I love. Yeah, I do love that. They were like, this is this is bad Like, okay guys We got it. Yeah, uh, and then fec daughters oc arc and heat knights all being at the top Everybody that's gonna lose strategic pieces. Yeah, everybody that's gonna lose strategic pieces that is very weak to shooting Obviously bone reapers can exploit some shooting sometimes in their catapult heavy armies, but you know I mean when you look at that it's like Those are all especially in the case of like heat knights and flesh eaters. You're talking about low wound armies That have their main pieces being very susceptible to shooting Right, so it's just an obvious immediate like their entire game plan collapses under under a shoot against a shooting army just like that so New plan Yeah All right turn one alpha strikes Uh, look who's the lowest tom look who's totally okay with turn one alpha strikes That's fine. We have you know why because they have enough chaff lines Correct because under no condition do they care about this Either they can do it because they're actually really fast and even their foot dudes can often turn with alpha strike people by running Like you're like we're cool. We're good or they have just their whole army is chaff. They have an That's literally I just brought chaff You're shooting on gore. Okay, go ahead. Exactly. Enjoy Uh, and then oryx again doesn't surprise me an army that loves doing turn one alpha strikes Right, sylvan f who very much has turn one alpha strike capability and can often castle against it quite easily right ogre's I was an interesting one to me I assume just because they generally have the meat to take it and or Are sometimes capable of it depending on the build and the other battle plan Uh So turns out the the the top bar though Skaven Skaven as as hating the turn one alpha strike the most Tom, how do you read that? uh That they feel That they that their battle plans are very susceptible to being removed Like so like when I look at that, I think about like they're really concerned about losing their acolytes They're really concerned about losing their x their like certain pieces are really susceptible to getting like They're gonna lose all their clan rats because they're gonna have their battle shock immune stuff removed the top one I don't know. I don't know why they're so whiny Maybe because it's an army that doesn't have a lot of easy access to battalions And so like you have to often like buy a command point I mean, they do have a lot of battle shock immunity. So I have all the battle shock immunity. Yeah stop whining like Like it's like i'm gonna say the same thing to ko okay here News flash ko you don't get to whine about first turn alpha strikes Because yes, you're the home of turn one alpha strikes. You're the home of it now granted. They are super susceptible to Like when i'm facing another turn one alpha striker like You got to understand that i'm doing like seventh dimensional math over here to make sure nothing gets in and and my stuff can't get removed at the top of one sure okay, because and And granted ko don't have those for the like the one drop alphas They're almost always two and three drop meaning against a one drop armies. They're actually really susceptible Against like super high mobility one drops sure like eels But there's no good eel idk armies, but You get the idea. I do Yeah, I mean ko makes sense to me. You're right because even though they're the home of one drop alpha strikes Well, yeah, I mean low drop alpha strikes. That's a better way to say it At the same time they can be very susceptible to it Like if somebody out drops them and can you know go and do a lot of damage If you can get in on that boat and do the damage the game ends Yep, yep, exactly The daughter's because they can lose a lot of characters like if they're if they're had queens and slaughter queens get blown off the table Right, then there are me. Uh, it's called marathi, but continue. Sure Uh Disciples is the one that made the most sense to me out of that topless besides ko. Yeah zeech Generally is extremely low drop Right. Yeah, but if they get alpha struck hard, they just they will fold Right. They don't have the wounds to generally withstand it even even with like unless they're a super heavy pink span build nonsense. Yep Um I was surprised to see again. I was surprised to see idk kind of in the middle of the list I thought they would have been a little lower Because again, they do alpha strikes really well if they want to and they're very protected against it I mean their whole armies in cover Automatically they and now they can have their void drum up as well I mean a big portion of their army is going to be on like three ups or two ups in the first round You know And they're again, they can prevent shooting alpha strikes by being like, well, no, you can basically only shoot that dude You can only shoot my unrendable turtle or whatever Yep So anyway Yeah, okay enough of that Uh, let's get into the summary of this particular section um My thoughts and tom I welcome your own So but here here are my summary thoughts like players seem to be responsive to their own army strengths If you're benefiting from a thing you're less likely to view it as npe, right? Yeah, like that seems to map pretty consistently. Yep um The activation wars were the highest overall amongst everybody You know it was the highest you pick amongst all the armies and stuff like that although again We're gonna get to a really interesting thing in just a moment Shooting continues to be a challenge. We talked about that already um You know armies shouldn't have really heavy especially long range shooting um Like we've benched in the skill floor already and my personal bias of high defenses rolling lots of dice for little effect Did not break nearly as high as I expected. Yep What else did you see for many of that tom? What other what other sort of from the fact The penalties to hit really struck me. Yeah, like everybody's always complaining about penalties to hit But nobody actually ranked it as like soul crushing Yeah So like as a negative play experience Uh, I think there's a lot of interesting data when you get into the factors. There's definitely a grass is always greener syndrome going on, right? and you know It still raises that like it's good to see that people do respond to these kinds of quote unquote incentives I guess what we would call it But when you see something like shooting where the couple armies that benefit from it are really low And then it just like jumps up and a lot of people really hate it That says something right. Yep. Yep Okay Ranking let's get into them ranks All right, so this was a really complicated set of data to work with okay Because so the way this worked in the in the survey is in the previous question You selected you multi-selected the items that you thought were npe Yeah In the next question You then ranked the ones that you thought were npe in order of You know worse in order of severity. Yep. So what's the number one worst thing? Here's what's fascinating tom this incredible deviation happened and I this is so Telling We remember that activation wars dominated Yes on the overall number of selections Yeah, yeah, but When we then had people rank 104 respondents Ranked shooting as number one Yep 51 percent of the people who selected shooting and by the way these the way you need to read these percentages is horizontally Right. It's saying of all people who selected shooting 51 percent ranked it as number one. That's that's how that percentage is working Right. It's a horizontal percentage Like so that you can read the count vertically and the percentage horizontally just so we're all clear So what this says to me is that yes people hate the activation wars, but holy heck do they hate shooting? Right like look at the intensity Yeah of that selection it just all of the things that they could choose shooting Right up top remember it was number three Yep In the number of selections, right? But by raw count of rank at number one it jumped up to the top Yep right 50 percent Of people who included it think about this 50 percent of those that included it in their list put it at first. Yes, that's the worst thing Yes so if you put it As one of the problems in this game Here hear this audience if you said That shooting was bad. There was a 50 chance. You said it was the worst thing Yes Isn't that crazy? Isn't that crazy? Yeah, exactly as Matthew said 75 had it at the top two right, right Again, it's just complete It completely inverted my expectations there because when I saw it as number three, I was like, yeah Well, that's not surprising. I know people hate shooting and then I got to this data set and I was like, whoa That is a big old switcheroo Well, I talk about edging out that the top Who? Yeah, like you want to know what the problems of the game are look at the top four Yep so, uh and then the uh the fact that uh So let's talk about magical dominance because there's another and if we move over to number two Yeah to rank two then magical dominance becomes real interesting magical dominance beats Both of the it it's the highest number two Right, right, right Uh, so again in within its chart Right, almost basically almost 40 of the people who selected it Said that it was the second worst thing and so magical dominance, uh Was the by far most popular number two choice So a lot of people again, it was number two overall in the survey It was number two very hard with a with a bullet here Right. Yep Uh, so I found this I found that to be really interesting again because we've been going down this road so strongly recently It tells me Stop Stop it Yep. Yeah, what we're doing is a problem. I love how we like as soon as Uh teclastrop nine months ago That's when the spellbomb got coin, right? Right. Yes, that's correct And I remember immediately we were like this is bad this trajectory if this continues is going to be bad for the game Guess what data bears it out. Yeah It's interesting because activation wars though. It was the most popular choice by raw total count Right. Yep. It's much more distributed amongst the top three as to how people found it Right, right whereas shooting just everybody it just front loaded all on number one Like people freaking hate it right now And I wonder if that's not a function of the fact that as we mentioned the activation wars has been kind of you know Falling into the background Right and and and shooting is at the forefront. You look at those top armies. Yeah Yeah, Seraphon singe Yep, uh Just exploiting shot one after the other doc doc Use flash snake shooting. Yeah snake shooting spamming snake shooting docs up at the top right now too Yeah, yep Yeah, yeah, no, you're absolutely right. It's funny. It's I so This this gets into the anchor bias Right, Tom. It's so funny because I said I said doc and you're like, what do you mean doc? It just didn't click in my brain for a minute Right, but you're absolutely right Um, it's it's this sequestered thing that is by the way, lrl also Oh, yeah lrl. Yep. Yep. Um You know, it's it sequestered into A few armies can do it really really well Right with either high-rent shooting high-rent mortal wound shooting or sorry long-range high-rent shooting or long-range mortal wound shooting Right when those things all start getting together Then It gets really bad really fast and I think when you look at those top armies, they're all doing some combination of that crap right If everybody in the army had an eight inch shot And that was it if that was the extent of the range it'd be like, okay. Yeah, whoever who cares Right. Yeah, I I can just see that monkey that muppet meme or whatever where they're like looking at the camera side-eye. Yeah Yeah, exactly Yes, I don't know what I'm talking about. Yeah um so Well, yeah, so, uh You know lrl is not statistically atop. I'd argue But it gives a horrible experience and that's the point Yeah, I mean the evidence we have is that they're they from tts is that they're a pretty top ranking army Um that they're in the top five or six armies. So I mean again Right and most of those are like 60 yarders Well, it varies a lot. Sometimes you got 30. Sometimes you got sometimes you got skew lists, but sure I mean again, I you know, I was on rob show last week and we did the songs section And so it's you know, what are you selling? What are you buying? Right in light of the recent goings on in the world? And I said If i'm a buyer i'm a buyer for lrl You're talking about an army that's already a tier easily A tier it's getting a new book and it's getting a new book and adding like 13 units 12 units something like that You know, whatever to that with new synergies new nonsense like I I do not know how that army doesn't just immediately explode into s tier So we'll see Anyways, it's getting a point rebalancing I guess Uh, no, don't feel bad for playing them. Never feel bad for playing an army. It's not You should never feel bad for playing an army says the slumesh player Which I willingly shelved, right? But that was and I didn't like because it was unfun for me to play with my friends That's that's a choice that I made you should not feel bad for playing an army That army should be better balanced and taken and be brought into line So you don't have to feel bad for it people love love the army you love play the armies you want to play, right? Okay, it's not on you Okay All right Assistant ref says lrl point rebalancing sentinels down 20 points. There you go. They them and croak both down 20. Okay So, uh Let's look at the bottom of this chart. So this is this is the other half of this chart, right? Um High amounts of dice rolling damage debuffs high melee damage Bravery and high rend they look like you just look at the counts here Right very very low points. This is where the data drops like a rock this whole set of Things is where they just stopped showing up as anybody picking them as number one Right, we're literally just talking about a handful of people in almost every case And you know, we already talked about this, right? Like is this does this mean it's safe to explore this more and push it into the meta and new design Or does it mean that as we do that? They would push way up, right? Like imagine if aos 3.0 as you've talked about tom gets rid of the become immune to battle shock Right, right Does something like let's just imagine that's gone Okay, do bravery debuffs then all of a sudden matter I mean for some armies but then uh and then chaos like peace Is that a bunch of passive bubbles? Yeah, sure. I mean like that's it if they do that then Does that create Does that create the shooting situation right of the haves and the have-nots? Because some armies are just like yeah, battle shock hot her her. I don't need that commandability. I haven't used that in years You know one reverse scaven, whatever, right? Yeah, sure Whereas a lot of we don't know what had things going to do in the new new book, but sure sure. Yep uh so, you know the um The the point is is that like that three factor thought of like It's It's voted low because it's just okay and you can explore it more It's voted low because the frequency of it is so rare right now people can't properly evaluate it, right? So you got a frequency bias or You people voted so low because other game mechanics are mitigating the negativity and It makes it really difficult to know what you can rightfully explore here Yeah What I'll say is that if I were to take a guess As to what wouldn't be bad if you bumped up rend damage Right and damage debuffs I think it'd be fine. I think that space is you can explore with probably little blowback I mean I don't like I don't know like that hits me as mpe like high supreme damage stuff is not things I enjoy I mean I like playing with my toys Yeah, sure. Well, that's why you also have units five units removed at the top of one That you know that like that's that's fair You'd have to be careful because if combined with big movement Then you get the turn when alpha strike game goes into overdrive. Yeah, sure And then you push that up through the root It's it shows one of the challenges of this right in that you need to give people special abilities But when you pull on a and b because of c you might also blow one of those out so right Yeah, that's fair. That's fair In line with what you're saying tom, there was quite a lot of verbatims of not a huge number, but a decent number of people talking about Having a negative play experience from like oryx Having having oryx come into them at the top of one and just you know blowing them off the table And they're like and they it was a real feel bad for them My my son discovered that when he played stormcast and pushed everything the middle of the table and I went are you done? And then introduced him to his other army. He plays and what they actually do in melee. Yeah Uh, see mucky. No, I didn't include summoning as an npe It would have been a good one to include like summoning and model refill is something I should have put in there Yeah, but there's just not there's not enough of it right now to really Like crank to 11. I mean, I don't know. That's my personal Would we be just double dipping on slanash on the activation wars? You know, I don't know But it'd be interesting Yeah npe army ranking. So the next question in the survey was rank all of the armies in order of npe right so you had every army in the list Which armies contain the most npe? The less npe. Okay Yep Corgiol did it did I try to control somehow for respondents with an axe to grind? I tried to I in the question Phrasing I was very specific and repetitive In every question as to exactly what I was testing for So, I mean, that's all I can do. I can phrase the question as clearly as possible to say Did this exact situation happen? Is this exact situation? Please, you know, what what of this exact situation? Do you consider npe? right, so and I You're not you can't really grind an axe against a specific army, but you can against a mechanic That can be evocative of an army It's hard to control for that stuff really like people whatever's in people's minds. I can't You hope it comes out in the wash, right through statistical significance. That's the best I can say Okay, anyways back to this uh npe army ranking Holy crap Love this one tom. You remember the chart earlier where we showed the number of armies played Right. Yeah Now see the inverse of that chart right Right It's so fascinating It's it's like, hmm the armies that rank the highest On npe and by the way, this is sorted again same way as the last chart where you can read column one is how it's sorted Right, so people who voted it as number one Yeah percentages run horizontal okay and It's the freaking almost perfect inverse of the last chart as you'll see in a minute because I did a little nice Yeah, that's all your picture um Like people don't like being hated Yeah, and by the by tom can we just gander at that seraphon dominance? I know I know they almost double The army under them On raw npe count of people who said they're the worst army Yep Yep Something like a quarter of all respondents to this question ranked seraphon the worst army What's One in four. What's the worst army seraphon? Yeah, that's insane Like that is such a jump Over its nearest competitor right because zeech and ko more or less neck and neck right statistically and significantly different Yeah, they both dropped. They both shoot people off the table. Congratulations. Right. Here's fun But seraphon seraphon take all the shooting of zeech Are all of ko and combine it with all the magic of zeech Yep, and they get bodies to boot Yeah, so this one's great. The only the only outlier fire station like hey, I'm late to this party. What's going on over here? Just over here not dying. Do you can you spot the outlier at the top of the chart tom? From our previous table or no cities Cities is quite highly ranked if you remember it was highly played. It's one of the most popular armies Yeah, and yet here. It's still quite highly ranked, right? Yeah, people quite don't like it And I was thinking about why this is I've got a theory. I'd love to run it by you. Okay, yeah Because cities Is the ultimate npe dabbler Okay Yeah, they've got a little bit of multiple fighting and like hammerhall They've got a decent amount of shooting but not like overwhelming caradrian overlords, although they can bring in some ko stuff Right into tempest eye They can run a decent amount of high armor for like round one or in some builds with like tempest eye They can do some amount of alpha striking with some of their units Maybe in like living city or something right like it can be so many different things. It just kind of dips its toe Into enough little npe pies that that all simmers up Yep Yep That's my theory again Who the heck no yeah, I mean I think that it's I think that it didn't show up in a lot of the other like things Because of the just simply the diversity the diversity of units the diversity of builds diversity that it's just not It's not standout, but those that are standout like the hollow heart shoot you off the table Yeah, hollow heart spelldom for for the magic for spell domination people when people think of cities That's what they're thinking of Yeah, it was interesting Once again, by the way, scaven dead in the middle the breakpoint of the table like literally 13 and then 7 They're the breakpoint, right? And then again your popular armies The only army to get zero votes for top npe Nighthawk Yeah, baby. You want to be everybody's friend roll up with nighthawk and everybody's like cool Cool. We can be friends now Very popular army everybody loves them aesthetically pleasing. Nobody thinks they're the worst army This is the winner. They were the truly the only army to get zero votes for the vote for number one I didn't have this data when I chose it But do you think it was an accident that I went from playing doc at the height of their power to nighthawk No, I think it like subconsciously you knew you had to atone I did I did I'm not gonna lie. I was like, you know what? I'm doing nighthawk. This is gonna be the nighthawk year Yep Yeah I think oryx end up being low, you know, somebody said it's a surprise that interesting or oryx are so low despite that turn one Alp strike potential I think ultimately that's mine to punch up right because ultimately there's still an army that wants to go have a punch up Yeah, exactly, right They're not shooting you from a distance. They're not mortal wound bombing the center of your army You know, they're not shutting you down in entire phases of the game They're just beating you to death with their fists Right. Yeah, I love though. Yeah, as somebody points out in the chat. I love the one person who hates on gets It's just there's somebody Somebody's like, you know, I hate more than anything 60 packs of grots That is annoying and they were like these guys in particular What's the worst 180 or 180 grots? Yeah hard pass that are returning Yes, yeah Uh, so, yeah, the in both this ranking in the army's blade scaven's the tipping point, which is it's always interesting to me So, yeah, uh, I love the inverse correlation here and in fact Tom, let's take a look of the visualization of that inverse correlation So I actually put these two charts together Yep, and then line mapped them, right? Yep, and Look at that correspondence. It's it's great. It tells the story so cleanly Okay Yep The light blue arrows are when you know the army like the farther down you go This is the count of number one npe on the right and the army's played largest to smallest on the left So just in case you're not getting what we're saying about a direct inverse correlation That despite what you see at tournaments people hate npe laden meta busting armies I don't know how else I can prove it beyond this Right fire slayers High on the npe low on being played Storm cast returnals high on being played low on npe right You can see how the top of the chart is all blue lines that match the bottom Right and or the bottom of the chart of armies played is orange lines that have to reach up into getting a higher count of npe The interesting exceptions were like I said just as we saw in earlier like visa chaos suns Which I probably account to like not a lot of sun's armies out in existence I think you know and and also it being kind of a boring army, frankly Kudos by the way to the shout outs to the flesh eater courts the beast of chaos and the sons of bahamut Who just accept your lot in life? Sure sure Uh, certainly they have an experience smash bat. Absolutely. Yes. Can smash bat smash that Yes, he can Yeah, so it was just a really like I wanted to do this visualization and perhaps that orange line on or that blue That orange line on flesh eater courts should be at the deep blue. I suppose Um, that's that's probably a bit of a mistake there Um, but at any rate like this so clearly visualized everything for me when I when I made this line chart up I was like, oh, yeah, there you go Right Yep So, yeah, I mean again just to repeat this thing I've said 10 times because I really wanted to sink in The best thing gw can do to help their overall sales out of line their financial bottom line is Seem to sell better When they're balanced, yep people will like one make great models That's probably still very important right because again we saw we see night haunt dominating over and over again in these things Because people the models blew people away, right? Yep That's one two is pitch for the middle with the rules Yep, right Yeah, that like ultimately Uh ogres was a success Yeah, sure. Yep, you know like ogres ogres had a lot of like hate, right? um when it dropped but The reality is is that it was you know, it was liked well enough Yep, they're doing better than they're than the like bone reapers that came out at the same time Right, right Uh assistant ref asks did you do anything on how many uh, How many example seraphon chose themselves as the worst npe offenders would be interesting to see how self-aware people are I did not that would have been a great chart. I didn't even think of that, but that's a that's a great idea assistant ref I'm sorry. I didn't think of that one One of the biggest challenges with this when I put these together is and the reason this one took so long Is because it was like a really complicated data set But like I have to sort of sit down and think about what are the interesting things to find And just start digging in the data and making pivot tables and and you know making and digging and cross tabs and not all of them bear fruit Right, so it's for them. We're like, okay. Yeah boring, right exactly like oh that didn't tell me anything interesting So so by the way folks, we're not done yet. No Tuck in There's there's a third section to there is yet another section. That's right Okay, so negative play experience verbatim Uh, this is where we're going to get into some commentary. I picked a small selection of comments. There were like 800 comments on this and I did read them all And he did buy But I did like 10 because come on now Okay Uh All right, so and and I thought it would be interesting because obviously I don't know who the heck these people are You know anyway, so I thought it'd be interesting to list the armies they played so Uh Here we go, tom right up your alley the ko list with the turn one spell in a bottle warplighting vortex wombo combo This is an example of bad game interactions. It should have been spotted before released. It's not that you can't beat it It's that it's a bad experience to play against 25 plus eels and idk lists are a marginal here It's not that the mechanics are abusive per se like the ko vortex, but it's not a fun army to fight against Yes, I play idk. It doesn't mean I don't agree that the list is boring to play and to play against and again I net deep kin only player. It's the only army that this responded plays So there's self-awareness here, right? Yep What this one what I drew from this one is There are these I picked these verbatim because I thought they were representative of sort of larger samples of what people said, right In concerns or yeah in concerns and this one to me what stands out Is that there are sometimes just these singular toxic elements That need a rata like immediately because they're so poisonous That they can just completely Ruin people's day one effect Right and this is the warp lightning vortex wombo combo as he calls it. This is total eclipse Right Like there's been a list of these. Um, this would have been vanguard wing at its height Yep vanguard wing change house at its height. Yep, sure That are just like so toxic so bad so dumb That if they one they shouldn't get to release and two if they do they need to be fixed like immediately Because every day they're out there still being played. They're just poisoning people's perception of the game I want to point out that we called out the ko warp lightning in a bottle The week that the book dropped. Yeah, sure because it was so obvious, right? Yep I mean, I think you had that. I think you were the one that mentioned it to me first I had I had gotten my hands on a copy of it And it was literally in so me and gary were bouncing it back and forth like within like Within minutes Of having the book in hand I remember us coming up and going this is it like we had seen almost nothing else in the book And we went this is the most broken thing Yeah, because I think I mentioned like throwing a purple sun in it or the dark fire demon rift and yeah And I was like why? Yeah, why why let's make them not move and kill half their army because on the numbers You know like I don't I don't need to rail on this but on the numbers if you do the math No other endless fell will do as much no other hundred points Will ever do as much damage as that warp lightning vortex in one in in one double tech. It's not even close Yeah, exactly Yep. Yep All right, so verbatim number two Against beast collaborators part of the ogre maw tribes the multi wound Damage resistant mortal wound dealing on the charge and high damage output during combat Just makes for an unstoppable force in my experience. I'm sure it's not the same for all But nothing I've thrown up against a list with multiple large beasts has managed to make a significant dent So what's interesting here is this this person plays a lot of armies storm cast silvaneth Disciples slanesh nergal slaves knight haunt and war clans A lot of armies there, which I respect right and It's funny because out of that list I'm like well with disciples or you should be able to burn that down or you know with nergal You should be able to withstand that or whatever But again, the reason I wanted to talk about this one tom and I'm interested for your thoughts here for sure is one One of the things that I noticed is that every army got called out basically There are very few exceptions if you look in the verbatims. There are people who hate basically every army Yeah right Uh with the exception being knight haunt, right, of course Uh, I literally do not remember a single verbatim that mentioned knight. Of course, of course, of course I'm not saying there's there's not one those knight haunt players are awesome Yeah, I'm just saying I do not remember one there might be one in the whole list I'm sure there's not but like Armies that we don't can traditionally consider being npe can oftentimes give some players trouble Right, right like when you have two blocks of 12 bowls um That for some armies, that's not like that. You can't win against that right Yeah, yeah, and so it's the the the relevant part to me here is just how list dependent Some of this might be right because this player if you just looked at the armies and I said, you know, okay player a is playing maw tribes and player b can pick from disciples slanesh nergal s2d or or war clans Right, they can pick out they can play any of those armies What's the win rate look like and you'd be like well It's got to be the second one, right? I mean just Well, no that stormcast eternal like looking at like I don't know how they don't just bounce off The stormcast army with all of that no rend ogres Sure Well, again, he's talking about the he's not talking about the ogre build. He's talking about the monster truck build So, okay. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah Which has a lot more friend, right? It's it is a big problem for stormcast Yep in the mortals charge. Yeah, exactly. Yep in the mortals on the charge So it was just like it's telling because we speak of these things as monoliths Yeah And they're really not right um because There are different lists different levels of experience different skill ceilings and floors on the armies themselves right Yep, and It makes it a real challenge Um roomy new player here beast claw feels really ridiculous to play against. What does slanesh do against them? Sure. I can help you out So beast claw is actually one of your depending on the exact list if it's like a heavy beast claw list Um, it's a pretty great matchup for slanesh because they need to come into melee You can match them speed for speed The trick is you need to be like pushing your greater demons and pushing them to go last You can beat them down. You need to make sure you're not like you need to have your chaff lines out through your like I'm talking current slanesh is all gonna change in probably two weeks, but You need to have your chaff lines out to catch them and control them Because they'll blow those up. But who cares what your chaff lines, by the way, are your, uh Your dumb little seeker dudes health writers Thank you that word not come to my mind And you need to make sure you're multi tapping them for for that like you go in especially on the frost lord on Stonehorn hard you either double charge it with Keepers of secrets or you make sure that the keeper is there along with the contorted epitome So you've got multiple roles to make the thing go last and uh You make sure that you like you need to be the one charging Not them when they're charging. They need to be charging only chaff when you're charging You need to be hitting them in in the tokus You need to be hitting their big boys in the tokus once you get rid of the frost lord and theoretically like the the The huskard on stonehorn the rest is all just like waiting to die Because the regular beast writers pose you very little threat all in all So and by and by that point you should have built up enough depravity that you're just like summoning in anything you want So you could you could just summon regular exalted chariots and go wreck beast the the beast dudes Okay, there you go. Hope that helps man The key is you've got to play a very careful game with slinash because you're always on a razor's edge All right as a gloom spike gets boss of jorke, which I love I think they switched that intentional which I think is awesome Boss of jorke. I want to call it that from now on the boss of jorke Uh, I ran several matches versus crydron overlords already Rough go right where we've tried multiple scenario deployment setups their ability to impact anything on the table from the Start regardless of what I do or how I scream means they can rid me of my central synergy pieces without losing much on the backswing Another nps grants playing as a city's army with huge phoenix guard flames by our phoenix on a two plus four up Charge your army alpha bunker you or alpha block you in right and then that's it tom As somebody who likes both of the broken armies on the broken sides of these combinations Yep of this particular player Yep You know by the way, this is a city's a sigmar fire slayers idk lrl dot and obviously a gloom spike player Right This just sounds terrible to me right like this is this is the worst You I think about that that maw's of jorke matchup against crydron overlords, and I'm just like oh god What a terrible matchup for them Right that is hard rock against soft scissors Yeah, and there's just not a lot of options Like I'm glad as it like you know, yes your glooms fight player. I'm glad you have other armies. Sure um because I mean just glooms fight in general are just in a bad spot and so like I Uh, I feel for you is what I'm gonna say Yeah, and there's not and there's not a and there's not a good solution there Yeah, to me what this one showed is How sometimes no matter what there's always the chance for npe because of just really bad matchups Right like strengths and weaknesses. Yeah strengths and weaknesses like the ko are so perfectly set to exploit exactly what the maw's of jorker doing And even if we brought the the squigs up some Yeah And toned ko down some It would still be A bad matchup right just because of the very fundamentals of what's going on right right? I mean the Yeah, yeah, you're gonna have a bunch of mobility variable squigs chasing after dwarves that can pick up and read a player return. Yeah Yep Sounds rough Like that's that's a rough go folks and they're gonna hit and just bounce off those boats that can re-roll their shaves And yes coach, I know it's actually the jaws of morc We're calling it maw's of jorke because that's what the player said and it's their army So it's maw's of jorke now jaws of morc is dead long live maw's of jorke I want to see all tournament reports report this army has maw's of jorke from now on Check's out checks out All right I am all about the maw's of jorke life. That's right Okay, I played against I played against a friend's std archion plus marauder list and he crushed me into a living Archion is already insane, but together with those broken raughters. I just couldn't do Yeah, I haven't played again since then because it discouraged me really bad I put this in because this is one of those ones that broke my heart And not only that and this is it only gloom spike gets player. Yeah. Yeah Yeah See I see stuff like this and it hurts my soul Like I want this person to play the game I want this person to have fun playing the game This is garbo Yeah, this should this should not happen Yeah Okay And That like that's why this one's in here Like I put this one in here because Like because these challenges are just Like so obvious like we wrote up marauders And and we just did we really think that was okay? Like the s2d book is really So fantastic. It's one of the better books they've written Yep It is a bright shiny Extremely well polished diamond that has this huge inclusion running through the center of it occlusion Occlusion I remember It has a big chip in it Right Yeah, f's in chat. That's right Because if you again as he said archaeons a big problem, but that's not what pushed him over the edge, right? It's the broken marauders Which makes sense. He was prepared to face tank archaeon Right because he didn't throw like 60 gets in and he'll he'll he can hold up archaeon with some negatives to hit and like That's a game because archaeons just one model. He'd have the body advantage But when he's got these multiple packs of 40 marauders coming in Blowing his units off the board Yeah, making 11 inch charges like it's a joke Yeah Yeah, it's this is it's ridiculous So if you happen to be watching this person who answered this question is this and I don't know who you are right, obviously I hope you come back man And and just get your friends to play other armies or I hope you find a new army to play with Or I hope they fix gets or you find something to to relight your passion because this really sucks And I don't like it And in a perfect world Um We wouldn't have armies that do this that this kind of stuff would get caught in in design in development and weed it out right Because that's a part like that's that's what we want. We don't want people to have to suffer through this. Yep. Exactly Uh Okay So, uh, you know when I complain about the waters, but you know what at the same time Uh, thanks for participating in the quiz. Yeah, I mean you're not you're you're not playing Assuming you're hearing this but thank you for still being part of the community. I agree. Absolutely. Thank you for staying in the community and uh the The yeah, I mean If you hear me bang on about stuff like croak and marauders and whatever right and sometimes people will push back in the comments And be like you talk about it too much or whatever. This is why I bang on about it Yeah, yep. Yep Okay, anyways moving on uh for me anytime my opponent's army prevents me from normally participating in the game It results in a negative play experience I don't mind when an army is powerful But when it prevents my army from doing its thing I no longer feel like I'm participating in the game armies that can debuff you or abilities like bellicor's dark master ability Which can shut down an entire unit or model for around our prime examples I'm torn because these are legit tactics, but at the same time they're not enjoyable to play against Slaves the darkness player It should be just labeled self-awareness player self-awareness player. Yes Yeah, I I included this one because I really felt like I understood this person You know like Because this is something I feel very strongly. This is like what this person is espousing is what I often feel Yeah, as a timmy I want to do my armies thing Right. Yep. Yep And when I face an enemy army that just says no, you don't get to do your thing At all, whatever your army was about I'm just like, oh, okay All right, like you're doing your thing But I don't get to do my thing Right What I want is both of us to do our thing and then if I lose I'm like, oh, that's fine. Whatever. I got to do my thing You know, that's cool Yep So I just I I felt a A kindred spirit in this in this one, right? Tom, what's your thing? Is it just winning spike, um No, no for me like for me Like I if I'm going to be honest like it's not winning Because vanguard wing is uninteresting Right like when that was at the height. I didn't just roll out with the storm cast that I had on my shelf Yeah, um change host it weren't my thing and so for me Like I have to have something that's that like There has to be often some degree of ingenuity or like I I can't take the flavor of the month list that everybody's taking So if I play ko in this meta my ko list, I can assure you will not look like anybody else's Yep Yep, so I want to win and I want to do well, but I just I can't Um, I I think that there is more blue ocean for us to play sure. Yep, totally fair All right, luminous in general is a really bad experience I don't disagree with that the weaker build aka the weaker build Aka hammers destroy melee armies and cost no points for their battle line The other side is just pure jank for all their spells hard to list because it's almost all of them Passing battle shock off to your units not allowing you to use command abilities and never forget the archers There are other armies for certain things like fire slayers and fight first ability 60 bliking's numer at the croak spell in a bottle And a few other things. I think those armies with some point changes could be fixed, but lumenath is over the top This is what this is the point I was making right this by the way, look at what this person plays beasts ogres blades Oof oof right all three of those armies are like I have a thing I do a thing I don't have a lot of tricks. I'm a straightforward army That's how I play and they you know like on the other side of the coin is literally this army that's got like 50,000 things They're doing every round You know you saw ben saba's spell list with lumenath Yeah, I did Like 12 spells he's got specific orders and he's got he's assigned you know each The way that they're all taken on each thing and it's this this then you move here Then you do this then this spelled and this spelled and this spelled and this spelled and this spell and it's like yep And also then I'll burn some gold and I'll burn it again over here and you know Yep How does it's it's this case of the one I loved about this one when I looked at the what this person played It's why I included this one because I was like boy if there was ever an example of the haves versus the have-nots Right Yep It's Like that army has such a high skill ceiling. It's insane like against a great general That army is extremely hard to beat And I do not want to know what it looks like plus 12 units As I said earlier It's uninteresting to me. Yeah, I get it As we know Good. I'm so glad that you don't like the aesthetics of that army because You getting your hands around lumenath With its capabilities Would just ruin people's entire existences and love of this game. It would just be a bad time for everyone, tom You should have that weapon Say what you should not have that weapon That's fair. You need to be playing night hot. That's the correct army for you Well, I have some on the case and more need to get painted. So there you go Uh, I loved this one because I think that uh, our friend shoe from rerolling ones would agree with this answer Consistency is key. Why are some oras holy within 12 and others with an 18? Why can some of you fight twice immediately? Well, there's have to work for the next activation Why do most armies have to play to their strengths? Well, some are above average in every single phase sce Blades of corn and slaves to darkness player Yeah I I'm tempted to read these in the term of like in the in the java watch the Civil war documentary like the 12 part Civil war documentary Sure. Yeah, I love that documentary But anyways, I'm tempted to read it like that Consistency is key Why are some oras holy within 12 like it's a letter back home, you know from the front? Yeah Uh at any rate, uh the This is one of those things that I know drives people absolutely crazy Just these little minutias and by the way the way to read this isn't the person saying why isn't everything distributed equally Okay, they're not talking about power differentials They're talking about Literally rules differentials where things work in different ways for seemingly no reason Yep. Yeah, right So like you can fight Twice, but this army's fight twice Is triggers immediately they don't have to wait for the normal activation Right Whereas this army's fight twice Is you know You go I go like with the unit right and then you go normally and then I get to then like I have something I can spend Like slenesh is a good example of this, right? I have a command point. I can spend to make a unit activate again Right, but I can't do it immediately. I can't just like fight fight Like flash eaters can right It's just the worst or or to even drive this home Let's look at the difference between the keeper of secrets command ability Like say you've got a slenesh keeper of secrets Obviously, she's slenesh, but uh keeper of secrets and a slenesh chaos lord in the same army Yeah, okay The chaos lord activates his ability at the start of the hero phase But it triggers later, right? He still you still have to go in order Yes, right So you have to like guess that that whatever you're picking to fight twice is going to survive Right, whereas the uh Whereas the um The keeper can just wait see if she survives and then if she does then burn her command point to do it Right Yep, it's just like these little like differences You know, it's just so funny because I like as you know, I've been playing a lot of magic Sure, and like it just makes me laugh that like So much of this game could just be key worded So, yeah, I want to talk about keywords for a minute because the temptation here is to run to keywords Right, but I'm just saying like so many of these abilities could have templates Yes, that's the difference. So if if I were going to do like I use I use keywords flippantly But the reality is is that templates are what I'm what I'm What I'm honing in on which are like standardized ability sets So if you know how an ability for the right, you know for the ring of rails And if you know how the ability works in one instance, it works in all the instances. Yeah So to me There's there's sort of this is very much a double-edged sword. I hate universal special rules I know you with a passion. Yeah, because universal special rules lead to bad design pretty fast I don't want to do I could do a whole show on this, but I'll try to defend Walked in railroad design decisions. Correct And hiding them under keywords is even worse because then I don't want to look at my scroll And see Ability a ability be ability see and I have no idea what those things mean I have to go read a different part of a book To understand what those things do So like when magic prints, they're commons and I think on commons they they list out all the rules Right, they don't just say like first right. They don't say first strike They say first strike parentheses. It does damage before it does this thing, right So I hate universal specials and key wording in general Because one it leads to railroad game design because once you create this repository of just like this is a thing You start stapling them in wherever you can now. That's already gonna happen. So I'm I'm you know, I'm okay with that But at the same time you shouldn't hide like the second you just put like Strikes first this that flaming dot dot dot dot. Okay. This guy has eight freaking keywords and no rules printed on this card And so we're back to playing Eight edition warhammer, right if I've got 90 universal special rules. I don't have universal special rules Okay, right I mean the way you cut that you split that baby is that you write the whole rule on the war scrolls But you standardize them. So somebody says Okay, what's your ability to do? Oh, it's just pie. It's the it's a k-man point pile and activation ability. Oh, okay Yes, it's the way they've done smartly like you you do you keep the text whole the best example They've done with this is sixes or double taps Yeah, right. Yeah, it's a common rule It doesn't need key worded. We don't need a universal special ruled It just gets spelled out. It can be given different flavor every time it happens, right But the text is always the same And the part of the other problem is that can paper over when you use that universal special thing it can paper over Underlying issues which are like broken phase activations. Like I mentioned the castle or thing Right. I am activating it. I need to remember. I have to activate it at the start of the hero phase And then I have to forget about it for some amount of time Right and then really remember. Yeah, and then remember that I did that thing earlier And hope that guy survived who I used it on and then go fight with them a second time Right. So I really hate like it can paper over sometimes these the real problems which are often inconsistencies in order of activation where you have to remember I need to activate thing here and then Now 20 minutes from now. I'm going to need to remember. I did that thing because it's going to have another effect Right So at any rate, yeah Okay, uh Don't mind armies having their random janky trick But some armies have them in spades e.g. Summoning by itself is fine But having summoning plus spell dom plus buff is still don't is insufferable Made me bringing back my 40 chain rasps by times two field balance fec l o n player This speaks right to the thing we talked about earlier, right where it's not right One of these things is usually tolerable when they start grouping together You know, you know, and this is a great example, right? You've got the summoning You've got a spell dom in the house. You've got buffed bestilladons. So super buffing plus long range shooting right, you know Pile on on pile on on pile on where the summation It's where it's greater than this one of its parts, right? That's when we dive deep into the nbe waters Uh, anything else you want to say about that one? No, I think that that's dead on. Yeah. Yeah Uh stacking these things is bad Yeah, yeah, exactly. Stop stacking them. Like stop putting them together When you do one understand that it can't get a second one of these things or it's going to go bad and definitely make sure it never gets a third right right, right Uh And then this next one's kind of this a long same line sometimes combination of things I don't consider npe can become npe if they're combined in a bad way or put on a unit That's too powerful earth guard berserkers a good example I don't think ward saves fighting first or fighting twice are necessarily npe But when combined on a powerful unit compounds and reduces interactivity Exactly. So not only is it the combination, but it's what the frame you put that combination onto, right? Again take I've said this a hundred times, but it's worth saying again imagine if everything in gristle gore Only applied to the ghoul courtier Right the four wound ghoul hero Where you can like fight on death and fight twice on death and all of that nonsense, right? Would anybody care? Probably not. No No, I mean you might get like a mini smash bat, but sure sure like In it on his best day. He's gonna run up and be like, haha. I did eight damage Right. Yeah, and you know that don't feel good. Yeah, exactly But when it's on a dude who can roll up and do like 60 damage Like whoa who shot across the board 20 inches or something before he charged, right? Oh So it's not just the stacking it's stacking on a power piece and the problem is The power pieces are often the ones that seem to have the most justification to stack on because they're the big special guys They need all the big special rules right Right. So you've got to like you've got to understand that natural bias we have And push against that So let me get this straight. We're here four years later after I submitted that Development that that letter of critique to gw Saying stacking is bad the summary of this big like three page letter In responding to the tomb kings problem was in how they dealt with tomb kings was stacking is bad And what we're finding is Still bad Yeah Don't do it bad design Like now this it's not stacking bonuses. This is stacking abilities. Sure It's same the principle is the same But the principle is the same. Yeah, yes Spread it out. Yeah And the last one here is it's great that armies have strengths and weaknesses Not all armies should have the same mechanics The problem arises when one army special thing is like hitting someone with a wet napkin While you're trying to fight the opponent's army whose thing is wielding a metal bat Which is on fire and plays heavy death metal rifts from doom every time they hit you with it I just love the way this person phrase this So good What I read there that genuinely made me laugh I can picture like the flaming metal doom bat And yeah, this this speaks right to the the inequity Right and again Stormcast Eternals player holding the army they play Right. Yep So there we go tom That's it That's all We did it We made it through Oof Yeah, uh Yeah, like So where are we at? Summary. So here's our wrap up. Um, you kudos to you, uh, 320 some folks who who survived this long um You know I The game's not in a bad spot No Again, we focused very much on the negative here, but It's like I don't want people to overemphasize this whenever we do a show and explore the negative elements of the game It's easy to then get wrapped up in the ennui and that's not what we're saying. It's not like the game If the game was terrible, I literally wouldn't have spent freaking 30 hours putting together that data right like this this What we were trying to highlight with these data sets Right or this data set and these these points is that um, there are some instances in the game That need to be dealt with there are some uh corner case Things that are just very bad experiences that we need to design a way from right Um, and that's okay, uh, we can correct those easily sometimes you can fix things with points sometimes worst roles just need to change Sometimes abilities just need to change. Yep Yep By the way, just as a quick note on the end This is why I think community driven comp or community points is like the wrongest of roads One it as I mentioned on rob show it takes all the pressure off of gw to actually improve the game Which isn't how we should fix things and two most things in this game that still have problems aren't fixed by points Right like in the survey when we did the balance survey Two to one people said the change that they think needs to be made are war scroll changes And I don't think community comp is going to start rewriting war scrolls Nope. Nope. So it's it's lipstick on a pig right Uh, yeah, I mean the summary to me is they need to think a lot about how they're when they when they write these abilities They need to think a lot about one how it reduces interactivity to How like within the army the stacking and how it's going to pile on Right and three we probably need to come to jesus about Uh shooting in general and what its role is in the game Right for ko they just got their second book Well plus 30 points to all units there you go problem solved fixed it No, I mean it's it's bigger than just ko obviously, right, right. Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely um I actually think ko are in a pretty good spot and of course I say that because i'm a ko player You're you're you're on that end like shooting six percent. I don't see a problem I don't see a problem uh No, I get it. I do um I think that they uh I think that they have some really interesting options and I would like them to explore that stuff more with the with like I think the the late great hope for ko is in their thunders I really do believe that Yeah, it's a shame when they redesigned the book they didn't push a little more into the melee space, right into having like The the thunders act more like stormtroopers or something and and you know kind of you know, you know, you know You know what the easy solution was for thunders Um when they activate in combat they can shoot instead Sure, like make them a more melee focused unit in some way or another right where it's close up They want to be in the biz and the reason why I say that like when they activate in combat they can shoot instead The advantage in that like they can't shoot if they charge right Because you can't shoot if you charge that's part of the rules. Um, you don't give them run it react charge And you like shoot run in charge or whatever Um, but also it would also be interesting because you can only the way the rules are you can only shoot at the things You're engaged with So they're not going to use it to like shoot out of combat and kill something else Like it becomes truly like an only like what they're locked in with. Yeah Yeah, I don't know. I uh Anyways, like we're not talking about uh thunders here. Yes Uh, I get it So all in all there you go. That's the results of the survey. Like I said, I'll try to put uh Put all of the survey data we've done over the three surveys up into someplace Maybe I can like draw a box or something might be the best way to do it. I don't know I'll take or something And uh and get all that out there for all of you who've watched. Thank you so much for staying here I never said the whole of course the whole time again. I forgot to say hit like But hit like now if you haven't already I really appreciate it We really appreciate it. It helps a lot of people find the video It helps build momentum and traction and all those youtube terms. So I really appreciate it And uh subscribe if you haven't already. Thank you all so much for watching I hope this was fun and interesting Uh, the power point three hours. This was a long one Just to end on a happy note somebody said it would be cool to balances with a positive play experiences show I think that's a great idea because there's a lot of really good Positive play experiences that we could highlight as well of what makes the game really fun I think that would be a great uh a great show to do. So I will certainly add that to our plans But as always, thank you so much for watching. We really appreciate it and as always We'll see you next wednesday