How do you feel about pandora's in keyword General power level on average?

[Filox]

18 hours ago, SEV said:

I think NB can be competitive. But as in many factions some keyword are just not good for competitive play...

This seem totally fine. I like what Wyrd are doing now. Instead of going hard on errata (which imo should always be a last resort) they had some new model for weak faction (the Damned will help Savage and Trex bring a real beater in the Fae keyword).

Combining that with GG adjustments and we should see slight shifts in the metagame. Top tier master will stay strong, but the option are there in NB... And if at the end of the day some master are still to weak, it's not the end of the world as long as the faction as a whole can be competitive. Well at least this is how I see things. 

To sum it up : errata for really OP thing or mistake. New models and GG adjustments to boost keyword. Cheer up, NB will be just fine.

The problem is, that new models are not an option to fix the keywords. We could just have book 4 & 5 all over again. We cannot just add more better models, because older models are not gonna be used anymore. You can look at Basse, he was mediocre, got a Sand Worm and Jonathan is ever more worst pick then before (instead of being a must have in his crew he is kind off a tech-tech pick which most of the time is not worth a hassle when you got Phiona which do same job but better. SW for lower cost is a bigger threat then he ever will be. 

You can add another strong minion to Lady Justice, but It won't change the fact that Recruiter is thrash. Before adding new models, we should fix older ones, so they won't be forgotten in competitive.

Same for some masters, Youko neeeds serious buff or design, more poeple are running Hinamatsu as a leader instead of her..., but the worst is that this is not a single thing in entire game. Rasputina, Youko, Sonnia, McMourning, Lych, Brewmaster, Victorias, Nekima and some more. All those masters are in dire need of changes, they win ratio is low, and they pick is non-existent in competitve. And it's not even about them being played less. A lot of people try to make some competitve list which can go against some big bois but most of the time they fall short, even against those who we take as balanced masters.

And even if another GG would boost melee & bubble crews, we could just have all scheme runners go on a shelf for a year. Which would kill another part a roster to bring back the rest.

I know we cannot just simply update the game as you can in video games, but creating and open "beta fixes" thread, where Wyrd would show us what fixes they have, where bigger sample crew would test it whenever they want and then just report back on forum, instead of creating their own little secret societies when limited players test new models or fixes which sometimes turn out so badly it's not even funny (Von Schtook, Kirai, McCabe and some others). Game should be played, created and balanced by players, not Wyrd. If we want fixes to models, we should get fixes to models. If we want new models, we should get them. This is simple marketing and business model which works all around the world.

[NoisyAssassin]

8 minutes ago, Filox said:

Game should be played, created and balanced by players, not Wyrd. If we want fixes to models, we should get fixes to models. If we want new models, we should get them.

I've seen this approach taken in various ways with some of the dead GW games (namely, Mordheim, BFG, and Epic Armageddon). It has...mixed results.

Mordheim is a mess of conflicting house rule lists and some very, very broken warbands. BFG has a pretty big schism between people who think the original Eldar fleet is broken and unfun, and people who think the new community version is weird, unintuitive, underpowered, or unnecessary. Epic has different sets of "official" army lists in the US, UK, France, and Australia, has lists or units constantly being complained about or comapred between the versions, and their rules committees actually usually make changes more slowly than Wyrd or GW. 

There's certainly some good that comes out of "design by democracy," but it isn't a magic fix, and has a LOT of problems of its own.

[Filox]

10 minutes ago, NoisyAssassin said:

I've seen this approach taken in various ways with some of the dead GW games (namely, Mordheim, BFG, and Epic Armageddon). It has...mixed results.

Mordheim is a mess of conflicting house rule lists and some very, very broken warbands. BFG has a pretty big schism between people who think the original Eldar fleet is broken and unfun, and people who think the new community version is weird, unintuitive, underpowered, or unnecessary. Epic has different sets of "official" army lists in the US, UK, France, and Australia, has lists or units constantly being complained about or comapred between the versions, and their rules committees actually usually make changes more slowly than Wyrd or GW. 

There's certainly some good that comes out of "design by democracy," but it isn't a magic fix, and has a LOT of problems of its own.

I'm not saying that community should take all the right to rules, it won't work. Wyrd will always have the last call, they are mediator between us and the game. But, they should listen and answear to us more frequently. Right now we have half a year+ of silence. Outside some alts, we got nothing to better the game. Or to keep players in and cure their frustration with various mechanics.

They propably have quite a lot changes for us (they should have, looking at current balance of the game), but what will happen if they just nerf everything what is op to oblivion and will be unplayable till another errata. That was what happened to Levi in 2ed, to Sandeep and Rat kings in this errata. they test sample is too small to say is something truly OP or just dead.

[ooshawn]

The way I look at it is there are life long people who like games(casuals) and there are people who are born to take games as far as they will go until they break, those are the people that need to be eyeballing these rules before they get released. Just to add a thumbs up or thumbs down on if something is ready 

[Adran]

29 minutes ago, Filox said:

 

And even if another GG would boost melee & bubble crews, we could just have all scheme runners go on a shelf for a year. Which would kill another part a roster to bring back the rest.

I know we cannot just simply update the game as you can in video games, but creating and open "beta fixes" thread, where Wyrd would show us what fixes they have, where bigger sample crew would test it whenever they want and then just report back on forum, instead of creating their own little secret societies when limited players test new models or fixes which sometimes turn out so badly it's not even funny (Von Schtook, Kirai, McCabe and some others). Game should be played, created and balanced by players, not Wyrd. If we want fixes to models, we should get fixes to models. If we want new models, we should get them. This is simple marketing and business model which works all around the world.

If you want a fix to a model, then you can fix the model. The process is called house rules. If you want to create new models then the same applies. 

Wyrd has run Public beta testing, M2e was done with nearly a year of public access to the beta files with plenty of chance to submit feedback. I can't remember if M3 had public access beta testing, or just a very wide private beta, but there was plenty of player interaction , so its a little bizzare to try and call out things from those you view as badly turned out as proof that players should have more input.  I'm not even sure you've got a consensus as to what is broken in your threads, let alone how to fix them.

You have also called out Nekima as a master that is not competitive. But she has won events. Yes, they were prior to the Butterfly jump change, but on the Forums Khanmage (who won a lot with her) has said he thinks she is still competitive. (And even prior to that change lots of people said she wasn't competitive)

What does this mean? One possibility is that she has a different learning curve, and so it might take you more effort to get her to the "top tables", but it has been shown its not impossible to get her there. I disagreed with your view that all masters ought to be perfectly balanced regardless of your skill level, and this is some where where I think it shows. 

Gaining grounds are designed to change the current Meta. Or put that another way, make some of the models you used to always pick, not be so good, and make other models you used to never take, useful.  How you, and your community use that will affect how much you put sections of your models away for a year (Nothing stops you adding a GG0 game into an event that is otherwise following GG1 ). 

I sometimes wish Wyrd was more vocal, but I also don't want to play a game where a significant number of my models get errata'd regularly.  That is what killed Guildball for me. It doesn't matter that the rules were free, and I could download the upto date cards for free, it still took up more mental effort to forget old rules and play with new rules than I thought was worth it. 

And I think you are wrong, it is possible for new models to "fix" old models. Its also possible that new strategies will "fix" old models. Both have happened in the past. Both don't always work. 

 Some Errata are needed, but I would really like it on the lower end. And I am happy to use "underpowered" models in games, and have used them to do well in events previously.

 

 

 

[muraki]

22 minutes ago, Filox said:

Right now we have half a year+ of silence. Outside some alts, we got nothing to better the game. Or to keep players in and cure their frustration with various mechanics.

Hasn't malifaux usually gone for yearly erratas / GGs / etc?  I know there were a couple of smaller erratas near the end of m2e, but that was when it was deep in its stride and with all the stuff going on in the world, it makes sense that there wasn't an august update (new faction, covid, etc).

I think it goes without saying, but changing anything that's 'live' takes way more effort than creating something new.  I'm sure the devs would love to spend all day tweaking models / releasing changes, but there's costs associated with changes (including monetary and player fatigue (as Adran mentioned about guild ball)) that limit the amount they can do during a span. 

14 minutes ago, ooshawn said:

The way I look at it is there are life long people who like games(casuals) and there are people who are born to take games as far as they will go until they break, those are the people that need to be eyeballing these rules before they get released. Just to add a thumbs up or thumbs down on if something is ready 

I really disagree with this statement.  Yes there are min-maxers in every game, but they don't deserve preferential treatment over causal players.  Top tier players are cool as they find new combos that end up showing up in a lot of metas, but just cause you're a top tier player, it doesn't mean you are a more worthwhile player than the person who plays once every 2 months with friends.  Both players like the game and put time / money into the hobby, and bottom line, that's all that matters.  This statement also seems to say 'this company should never put out anything if the player base doesn't rubber stamp it first' which doesn't make sense.... cause 1) it's their product and 2) I've never seen 2 players actually agree with each other over a topic.

One other thing I'll say is.  From both software dev and software testing jobs... testing requires a special skill set.  Yes you have to find what's broken, but you also have to be used to dealing with frustrating situations / change gears relatively quickly and be open / positive about the direction things are going.  It's like a person in my local meta, he's really good, but he was terrible in some of the open betas cause he couldn't get into the right mindset to test, and instead was viewing everything as 'i just lost that tournament game, it's broken'

Semi-hot take.  If you want this game / community to feel more like a 2 way street, maybe you should work on your delivery.  I know a lot of nuance is lost in text form, but some of these posts have felt very accusatory / peer pressurey and that's not the way I want my community to act.  For instance, I'm still a bit miffed (and maybe this is the old guy in me) that there was never a 'sorry, i came off a bit harsh' response in the Euripides thread after being called out about the tone of the first post.

I get it, you love the game, you like where it is, but wish it was even better, and are worried that a lack of posts equals a lack of community involvement / interest which may lead to 'everything is fine, why worry' from the devs.  You've also spent money on the hobby and are worried that if issues aren't fixed you'll end up having to spend more money to switch to a different faction/master that doesn't have those issues.  They're all valid concerns and I've had all of them myself in the past (and have watched people change faction / leave the game for parts of it).  But if there's anything I've learned from my old MMO games, is there's a line between critiquing something, and turning players off to the game / community, and you guys are on the line / over it for me.

[NoisyAssassin]

51 minutes ago, muraki said:

One other thing I'll say is.  From both software dev and software testing jobs... testing requires a special skill set.

As a software tester, definitely agree. Another relevant takeaway from my job is that users see the few issues that make it into the released product, but they don't see the hundreds more that were fixed and iterated out along the way. This makes it easy to think "hey, what are they doing / isn't anyone testing this / what are they even spending time on / etc" without realizing all the effort that goes into making it as good as it is.

[trikk]

While I disagree with some of Wyrds design decisions, things like Thalarian Quellers we're mentioned multiple times in the beta which means:
a) Wyrd things those models are fine as-is
b) Wyrd knows more than we do
c) Wyrd lacked the manpower to fix 450 models and 21 upgrades simultanously.

 

I personally think it's a bit of all 3 of them. 

[santaclaws01]

11 hours ago, muraki said:

Yes there are min-maxers in every game, but they don't deserve preferential treatment over causal players.

To add to this, just because a player is narrowly good at the game and can get top table a lot with their preferred crew(s), doesn't mean they're actually good at game design or balance, or even have a good idea of what's good in stuff they don't play.

[Filox]

9 hours ago, santaclaws01 said:

To add to this, just because a player is narrowly good at the game and can get top table a lot with their preferred crew(s), doesn't mean they're actually good at game design or balance, or even have a good idea of what's good in stuff they don't play.

We can at least try to be good! It's better to spew ideas at Wyrd hoping it would help them in future designs.

We might not know what models gonna be released in near future, so we as player base cannot look at it from broader point of view, but at least we pretty good know what currently is wrong with various keywords/models/upgrades

[Adran]

[Mod hat]

 This is getting out of control. I'm locking the thread because I don't want to return in 3 hours and discover I have to delete a large number of posts and issue warnings. 

In general disagree with each other, that's fine. Personal attacks are not good. If you can't disagree with someone without insulting them, then leave the threads. I believe there is an ignore function somewhere.