RisingPhoenix

Well if there's anything I've learned about the internet, it's that for anything no matter how unintuitive, backwards, and flat out stupid something is, there will be some valiant defender ready to explain how it's all counterplay and you just don't understand the genius that created it. Since you haven't actually given a meaningful response to anyything I said (one line was literally just repeating two words with quotation marks around them) I can't see any fruitful conversation happening here. Bye.

Plenty of people play doubles. If you hosted your series using the default rules rather than variant rules, you'd have plenty of people playing doubles. What you've done is ban people from playing doubles in your tournament then go "well everyone seems to be playing singles from what I've seen..." I know confirmation bias is the human condition, but please tell me you recognize the major logical fallacy in what you just did there.

Versus Final Sacrifice, which is a pretty damn good ability. I'm also not convinced the heal aura is awful with Leveticus 1 - I've had similar with Hodgepodge and thanks to Marlena that crew gets a lot out of 1 point heals. I could see some world you tossed cheat from the top on Rusty Alyce for turn 1/2, got some mileage out of healing, then ran off and scheme ran - again if scoring is allowed to happen before end of round and 4SS scheme runners subsequently get a real role in Malifaux. Clearly there's other things wrong with 4SS models and neither is seeing play and that's the much more important thing to fix. But if they do this I think it's a reasonable hire for Leveticus crews. Then again, I keep thinking the Effigy is reasonable then remembing 4 SS scheme runners do nothing in M3E.

Because they get their jank all over everyone else's stuff. Witness this thread.

I'm pretty sure the fact you can place inside the 8" bubble pretty freely is not at all intuitive to anyone reading the ability for the first time or new players. Most players would think it would stop things like Lynch's demise ability, when in fact it rarely affects them. You can call this counterplay I suppose, but it feels exactly like unintiutive glitches in the game rules, same as with Bandidos and Drop It bugs. I'm reminded of the year long period where you could ricochet a bullet back onto the original target thanks to change in another - glitch due to unitituitive wording, or clever use of ability?

Are these timed, or are they playing it out every time since it's still online? Also can the UK please get the stick out of their ass with regards to second masters?

The real question is why do the Bandidos have 8 instead of 'Whenever a model drops a scheme marker within 8"' Like they already need to draw line of sight to make a gun attack, why do they also need to draw line of sight to the marker? All it does is fuck up the ability . There's a lot of glitches in the game regarding that occur because the developer uses that when they mean 8". Like Gravity Well, Gravity Well and dismounting McCabes feels wrong (model with Gravity Well kill McCabe? No problem. Just do the replace and place him down inside the Gravity Well!). Overall I really think it should not be used as often as it is.

It's a 4 stone significant model with Df 5, 5 wounds. Mv 5, and hard to kill. That alone means if they ever do get around to allowing both points of schemes to be scored during the game (instead of at the end) it'll have a role as a cheap scheme runner. It also has a crappy self-heal, which is awful, but a lot of scheme runners have Wp 4 making it a really obnoxious tar pit (as if it hits with the attack they get distracted and it goes above the HtK threshold). If it can score a scheme and then tar pit a 6 stone model it did its job. Or score a scheme and Final Sacrifice. It's almost shocking how it's basically strictly better than Desperate Mercenaries at doing that (I guess it can't shoot for 1/2/4... gee). Malifaux as a whole has a problem where 4 stone models just kinda suck as a concept, but if that ever gets fixed (which granted feels unlikely) it's a pretty solid scheme runner. I admit the idea of it ever putting a fate token on a horseman seems implausible, but as far as 4 stone shit goes it's pretty decent.

Mate, there are many things wrong with what you wrote that I won't dive into (because many of those were not reasonable and were never tested), but you realize that was Wyrd's server to test changes, right? I desperately hope you didn't join Wyrd's server to test changes in order to, um, tell Wyrd they're changing things too often and that annoys you. That'd just be 0/10 userful feedback, pure trolling. As for reality, we're not chasing perfect balance here. Perfect balance is a myth. We'd like a world where there's more models taken and more crews that are viable because Wyrd was willing to perform buffs on models that are "eh" and "below the curve". That doesn't demand 25 changes to chase a mythical thing that doesn't it exist, it demands a small number in order to make more crews viable and the meta more interesting. Don't bump anything to Defense 7, don't break the game, just minor, reasonable changes to make more models viable.

I, um, press X to doubt. The changes were in total +1 Df/-1 Wp, change Challenging to Caught in the Ring, and changer Regenerating to Broodfighter. Unless they tried completely reworking Barbaros' entire function and then abandoned that rework (which is a different problem) there just isn't enough flex on the changes to actually have had ten iterations of them. Now the odd one out in there is Broodfighter. It's a brand new Keyword ability, templated to create a lot of mobility for a keyword with black blood and lots of regeneration. With the addition of the Keyword RETURNED then that would lead one to believe that Broodfighter is part of Lilith's Neverborn keyword. As a Keyword ability that will appear on multiple models and help define her crew's playstyle, do I absolutely believe it changed ten times in playtesting? Hell yes. With a crew keyword, even minor changes does massive things (see the Von Schtook disaster). Is that the same thing as Barbaros changing ten times in playtesting? I kinda don't think so. It's pretty dishonest way to frame things. But hey, since we have this beta test pool where Wyrd can make changes and have them tested, why don't they make some minor changes to a whole bunch of models in the beta pool? Then they can be tested out over time and they get feedback. If we can't have changes in the real world without testing, they can at least do fast iterations in the kiddie sandbox right? Then when they roll out the once-a-year balance patch they can make a whole ton of changes, right? If Wyrd would just talk and say "hey yeah we're going to toss a bunch of changes onto the beta sandbox with a plan to incorporate them unless we run into issues" that would satisfy me that something is happening behind the scenes. Well if we keep tweaking 1-2 models at a time, we'll get around to Rabble Rousers and Phillip and the Nanny around what, 2025-2027? I mean they're hardly Gaki levels of terrible, they're just not... good. So if we continue at this rate of buffs, that's the situation for the next 5 years or so (at least). Or if we did some small buffs they'd be more worth taking, maybe there'd be more reason to take some in-keyword models for Molly. Would that be more fun for Molly players? Hopefully, yes. Would that make more fun to play against Molly? I admit I'd have to learn to play around Phillip and the Nanny since I don't think I've seen him on the board more than once or twice, but that honestly sounds like fun to me. I kind of get a thrill when I see a rarely-taken model, especially if it does interesting things.

@Maniacal_cackleWell this might be the biggest jump of... all time ever. There's a pretty big gap between "doing multiple power-level errata a year and being open to buffing models in small ways to improve diversity and available options" and "abandoning the physical playspace". Like an enormous, huge gap. And it's not a slippery slope or anything of the sort from one to the other. Hell, over the past ten years board games and physical games in general have seen a resurgance. Now COVID has doubtless put a damper on that, but I believ tehy'll continue to gain popularity. They won't replace video games, just as video games have not replaced them. But they also both can learn from each other. Malifaux isn't a video game, and shouldn't become one. But it shouldn't learn nothing from them either. Ignoring them is just as crazy as becoming one. Having more models and more masters be viable picks is a good thing. And small tweaks to models to make them more viable is one of the best ways to get there. Are you actually willing to state outright that you have an issue with having diverse options available, and would prefer less masters being viable over more and having trap models that are not worth taking? P.S. with small numerical adjustments you can use the same cards as before with the help of a sharpie, if physical cards are really so important (which no one is really convinced they are)

So people check scoring in the app at the start of a game because they might have forgotten the exact scoring rules, were unlikely to have memorized the schemes and strats in the first place, and if they haven't played in a while things might have changed. It seems we can equally expect that people to check the models in the app at the start of a game because they might have forgotten the exact card text, were unlikely to have memorized all the stats and abilities in the first place, and if they haven't played in a while things might have changed. These look the same because they are the same. That's how people operate in reality. People check the app. Or if they just want to play a casual game where they don't care, they don't care if they're playing with the latest rules or latest stuff, they play their game with their friends and don't worry about it. And they get all sorts of rules wrong, terrible terrible rules to get wrong that completely imbalance the game. And they just go and mess them up! And its casual and they have fun with their friends and they don't care. A small number of people on the forums have invented a fictitious category of overly persnickity people who really care about getting every rule correct but can't actually be bothered to do any work to make it happen as a rhetorical device. Go look at the rules and clarification section - if you can't reference that at the drop of a hat you are literally doomed to play malifaux wrong, because you will be messing up great and terrible rules you shouldn't be messing up. I'd wing it that since GG2 at least half of all "casual players" have had a summoned model interact with a strategy marker - if they've played in enough games to even play with a summoner. If they don't have a smart phone to reference during the game, they're not persnickity at all. Or they're playing a different game, one with less rules complexity, more streamlined implementation, and which doesn't have all the warts of Malifaux. So yeah, if you don't have a smartphone you're playing the game wrong. But that was always going to happen. And every player of Malifaux has bought into that enough to keep playing (if you think M3E's rules are ornary, M2E had more exceptions than rules). Buffs will make the game more diverse and make more masters viable for people who play frequently. And people who don't play frequently and don't look up things on their phone won't care.

@DuBlanck The changes that casual players really notice and the changes that serious players notice aren't at all the same things. For instance, imagine if you removed this from the back of the Dead Outlaw's card: Casual players would probably be shocked. This model lost an entire ability! An entire ability! It's huge, it can obey enemy models, it's got two triggers, you can't just remove it! Anyone who plays the crew competitively would know this literally doesn't change the Dead Outlaw. At all. Meanwhile for a competitive player, Barbaros going from Df 5->6 is a hugely impactful change, while a casual player is probably not even going to notice there's a difference. It's exactly things like "total movement range" or "exact defense numbers" that casual players need to check, but changes to these are often very impactful at making models better and worse, and are easy ways to slightly improve models and increase diversity. I've explained this difference what feels like three times now, so hopefully this time around you got it. A small change is not "completely rework the card". It is change a stat or two, add a trigger, those sorts of small changes that casual players don't have memorized, and are not going to notice being different, but which can very much effect if the model is worth taking. As an aside, these sorts of small changes are also nice in that it doesn't really matter if their cards "lag behind" the true card by a few months. When they do get the update, the way the model plays won't completely change (like Benny or Bayou Smugglers, which were massive reworks), the model will essentially be a similar model to what it is now - just a bit better.

Um. So does anyone who plays once a month memorize their stats cards for every one of their models? Because I play with people who play way more than once a month and they still check their cards. You just don't memorize every stat value and TN on a card unless you play with it on a near daily basis, at least for most people. I really must meet these once a month casual players who have all their cards completely memorized so well they can recite them with 100% accuracy from memory, don't own smartphones, are unsure of how the internet works, and decry everything digital yet feel compelled to play with only the most up to date rules and components no matter what. I feel like I must round up a few anthropologists and turn it into a true expedition. How do they live? What do they do for work? Are they still genetically similar to homo sapiens?

Out of curiosity, how do these mythical beasts deal with the issue of Gaining Grounds? I mean they wander into the store unaware of any apps, websites, errata, faqs, or anything happen in the community, and... what then? Do you introduce them to the four new strategies and 13 new schemes that make up the objectives of the game? Because this is the fundamental rules and objectives of the game that you're playing that change on a yearly basis - and that has far more impact on play experience than a couple of model changes. I guess everyone I know has one of those newfangled digital smartphones, is aware of the existence of the internet, and at least interested enough in the game that they're broadly aware of changes. I'm not saying no one has been caught off guard by a sudden unannounced GG Update, but this level of sheer disconnect from players isn't something I regularly encounter. Maybe this is just the famed rural/urban divide in action. Although I still wonder why if Cletus is playing Billy-Bob they can't just use their GG0 cards and rules since apparently they're not following any of thte updates anyway. If you just don't give a fuck, why would you use new rules? Hell, they could play Malifaux 2E for all we know, the rules are still in the books, the game still works just fine. They don't need to follow any update they don't care for (which they won't be doing because they don't have any electronics apparently).

Would you be if they buffed your new crew and made them better? I tend to doubt it. I've never seen someone react negatively when a model gets buffed. I suppose out there there's some person who wants their models to be bad and is atrociously offended when they're good, but I've never met them. For people I know who play once a week they have to look at the app to remember the exact details of their models most of the time anyway. If one goes from Df 4->5 do you think they'd even notice? Odds are pretty good they wouldn't. And the "bad stuff" is that they play the old version of the model that isn't very good - which is what they're doing anyway. So to me this seems entirely theoretical. It's all hypotheticals. I'll tell you what I have seen - when they buffed order initiates my local arcanist player pulled out his Marcus and tried lists with 2-3 order initiates. The list wasn't that amazing, but the order initiate was sure a damn sight stronger than it was pre-buff, and he liked that. Now I've seen him consider playing Marcus more - which was entirely inspired by a buff. So against this hypothetical my real world experience is people love buffs. People love when the new masters have made crews like Perdita viable. People love pulling out their models and trying something because "hey it changed, lets see what it feels like". Real, actual people. There's been some complaints because of the sheer scale of Malifaux Burns changes, but again Df 4->5 is the exact opposite of those sorts of sweeping changes that practically involve relearning matchups from the ground up.

Player engagement is higher when players know the models they find thematically interesting and fun to paint will be on the tabletop. Most people playing tabletop games want the models they paint to be both useful pieces on the tabletop as well as pretty to look at. Most people are fine writing over a number or two with a sharpie or using printouts of cards or the digital app, and physical cards are available Print on Demand for the small minority that demand professionally printed cards (again using those same illustrator files, and available to order off DriveThru Cards the same day it issues for that tiny minority). Malifaux's rules are maintained digitally and we live in the 21st century, we don't need to act like it's the 1970s and we're grognards in our Mom's basement. Changes being infrequent leads to a whole host of issues. A company that's responsive to customers and quickly addresses problems creates a dynamic meta with lots of diversity in masters you face leads to higher player engagement and higher player satisfaction as well as attracting new players who can see tournaments and see it's true that you can "buy what you want and it's viable" giving Malifaux a strong sales contrast to more grognardy wargames.

You're right, it's not a video game. Video games are rigid and slow. To effect a change in a video game you actually need to change the code. Here you can go into Illustrator and change a text box or number, plot the image, and then push the image to the crew builder app. It's significantly easier and safer than changing a computer game, you can't change Yasunori and have the Malifaux Raptor lose the ability to attack because humans are evaluating this, and humans are far smarter than computers. One of the things I like about tabletop games is the far higher degree of flexibility they have than computer games. Any constraint on the number of models they can change is purely artificial. They could change 50 models at once if they wanted to, with no risk of bugs or code crashes or any of the issues video games would encounter.

I don't want to get into debating terms and tossing them about, but... why do I have to pick one? What says that we can only buff one model? If I had two models that needed buffs I'd buff two models. Adding a line to the Errata "Yasunori: Chasing Advantage reverted to every two cards (round down)" wouldn't cost them a buff to a different model. They would then have time to see and evaluate how a minor buff impacted his play rate, and if he needed another. This is an artificially created limitation that is actually holding back the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of small changes. Because we aren't making small changes, we can't see if the small changes make a model more viable (or if larger buffs are needed). Then when Wyrd does make a small change the result is anger because people think that if the model still sucks Wyrd isn't going to revisit it ever, and this was its "one chance to be good." I've praised small changes like Barbaros that were incrimental improvements. I think Barbaros was an excellent example of pushing a model from maybe a "4" to a "6" with a few small changes. Hitting a few 3s and 2s with small changes like that to potentially make them 4s and 5s is good because then we can evalaute if they still need more buffs, or if a small change was all that was necessary. He wasn't the worst model in Outcasts (in fact he was playable), he's not even our worst versatile model, he's not even our worst versatile model we had that was 7+ cost. But low impact tweaks are easier to make than huge sweeping changes, and can give an indication if you do need the huge sweeping changes that require lots of playtesting. I've seen that opinion, and I'm not positive I share it. First, I think to even make it requires a baseline of "underperforming" and "overperforming" across the game. I'm reminded of 2E Sandeep, where not only was he "overperforming" but also he was the Arcanist's only viable master. So he was overperforming relative to Arcanists, but was he overperforming relative to the game's power level (well, yes). But was nerfing him with no buffs going to improve people's play experience by basically returning Arcanists to "the deleted faction"? We have to get every crew to around the baselines for nerfs to be the most important thing. If ever crew is "pretty good" and then something is overperforming (say a new guild minion makes it way too easy to hand out burning) reverting it to baseline increases diversity. But if everything is scattered, with very few viable crews, then nerfing the FOTM just gives you a new FOTM. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a certain company initialed GW is pretty infamous for that endless treadmill, and their game hasn't really gotten more balanced for all that they've chosen to run on it. Sometimes nerfing can even result in no master in the faction being in minimum viability. M3E is not nearly as bad off as M2E in that regard but we still need a mix of nerfs and buffs to increase diversity, not just pure nerfs. Pure nerfs often just push players from "#1 master" to "#2 master" but if we nerf #1 master, and give small buffs to underperforming models for masters #4/5/6 at the same time, suddenly there isn't as obvious of a #2 and diversity increases. And again, small buffs to underperforming models are easier to test and implement and far lower risk than massive reworks. It's pretty easy to go "hey, are we nerfing Nekima? Lets toss in a buff to Bandersnatch and Razorspine Rattlers" Then we actually get players shifting from one master to several, increased diversity, rather than just walking one stair down the stairwell and picking up the crew on that stair. P.S. I don't know if restricting crew was "the solution" to English Ivan. He reliably did 10 damage a turn, summoned a 7/8 stone model, and removed an enemy scheme marker. That's the sort of 15-20 stone swing per activation that's very dangerous, especially when your totem is a legitimate model that can Thoon an enemy in shadow markers. I will say that second master Ivan was infuriating in a completely different way, like oh gee, yeah, that's horseshit. But for a much better example, Seamus spends a lot of time OOK in Ressers. Maybe thematically he's exactly the sort of asshole who creates hiring restrictions when you take him in a crew? Maybe he can't be hired into a crew with other living models? It's an interesting way to make it not so easy to take him OOK or to take OOK stuff with him, without directly nerfing his in-keyword crew (who could probably use a few buffs anyway). I'm not familiar enough with Ressers to know if that's workable or if he has a living in-keyword model that would need to be adjusted along with that, but it's the sort of idea that could be played with.

So I've circled back to this idea, and I think I came off too harsh in my initial assessment. I think there's interesting design space with increasing model costs OOK. Not across the board (I stand by the fact this would just limit choice), but for certain crews. Leveticus 2 and his hiring restriction inspired me here. While that's clearly to avoid worrying if every model released in Outcasts for all of time is broken with any one of the 4 riders, it opens more design space than just that. For instance there's been an idea that summoners are partially balanced because their minions are "less good" due to being summons. Largely though, that's irrelevant - many summoners like Daschel, Ivan, Asami, etc. can grab from a list of powerful versatile and OOK models. I think that having "second versions" of masters gives us room to explore crews that have models way above the curve - but gaping holes in their lists they can't repair. Or really good summoning, at the cost of fielding a crew that's initially just weak. For instance, imagine if there was a version of Sandeep that could only field Golems - but all Golems got +1 to all stats, and he could attach upgrades to them. Or a version of Dreamer that could only field Nightmare minions, but could cycle them back onto the field at an amazing rate. Or if we decided to nerf English Ivan not by smacking down his actual on-card abilities, but by restricting his ability to get the Intrepid Emmissary and other usual suspects, making him play with Dua and Umbra models. I don't think it's good for the game to totally restrict it, but I have been convinced it's appropriate to do with certain things. P.S. We still need a lot more buffs. It might take time, but Wyrd is also operating on a 'we can't go back and adjust things we adjusted' when in fact those are things that are the most likely to need adjustment and the things most likely to need revisiting. Like at this point we can conclusively say that Yasunori was hit too hard by the nerf bat, GG3 could have dialed up his power level without returning him to his former status of "Ten Thunders Rider that doesn't take a few turns to come online". We should be open to further buffing Molemen if they still aren't seeing play after a year, or partially reverting nerfs that hit specific models too hard. Those aren't indications of failure, they're indications that good design is an ongoing process not a perfect ideal.

Well someone has no clue what he's talking about indeed. Games do not need 100 million players to be balanced. There's plenty of board games that are very well balanced and often sell 30-50k copies. This idea that it takes "100 million players" to make a decently balanced game is just nonsensical. A game with 100 players gets there the same way a game with 100 million does - big changes and little tweaks until everything works right. 100 million players might explore the play space slightly faster, but nothing about that changes the process - just the speed its executed at. But then we circle back to one of my earlier posts here.

Meh, no, this is false. Starcraft 2 is balanced to the point where every single unit in the game might be built at some point or another. Star Wars: Rebellion could see pretty much anything seeing play in the right circumstance if it fits a role. And Eclipse 2E I don't have experience with enough yet, but I'd be willing to bet most of it is balanced from some pretty competitive initial plays. What you've discovered is something different - most games are poorly balanced. In fact this is so endemic that people will actually argue that somehow this is inevitable (rather than admit that some of their favorite games are not written by people who are very good at balancing games, I guess?). Logically as long as the game is complex enough that there are a variety of roles available for something, the game can have as many balanced models as there are unique niches to fill. Malifaux is very, very, very far from filling every possible unique niche for models (and that's before we mention that crews can invent new mechanics to have new unique niches to fill). Just because another game does something poorly is no reason Malifaux has to copy that. Malifaux didn't copy dice, did it?

So plus side and good sign for us, Barbaros in outcasts got changed. He was a slightly undertuned tarpit/beater who got slight buffs: They swapped Df5/Wp6 to Df6/Wp5 Gave him a little extra movement turn 1 (to get in there faster) Made his tarpitting more reliable especially if you have staggered This doesn't make him an auto-include by any stretch, but now he's just a little more 'on curve' for a 9 stone model. Hopefully this is a good sign of tweaks to come.

In reflection I'm actually quite happy about Barbaros because it's exactly the sort of minor buff I think more slightly underpowered models should receive. Barbaros was slightly below the curve. This change: Gives him 2" more movement on turn 1 Gives him a 7.1% less chance of being hit by a stat 6 melee attack (or of forcing another model to cheat first) Gives him an ability to really lock a model in melee with him that is NOT dependent on him going early in activation order. That brings him pretty on curve for a 9 stone model - Built in suit to conditionally get 3 attacks, 2/4/5 daamge track, Black blood for more damage, can stone critical strikes, df 6, armor +1, 9 wounds.

Well, they definitely changed Remi. Lets see if this makes any of the other snipers in any other faction more viable. Spoiler: it won't. I gotta hope they've got a better errata brewing and this is kind of their rough draft. Seems mostly to nerf some things that badly needed it (English Ivan, Nexus, Archivist, Bebe, Mikael, the 'insta-delete master' combo) and push out some uncontroversial buffs that didn't need much testing.