Goatboys playtesting article - thoughts

[DrLove42]

Goatboy, bless him, has missed a very important point about game design and testing, and rather than it being lost in a sea of trolls that is the comments section (50% I hate GW and 50% goatboy sucks! comments) I figured i'd put it in here

The point he missed is that players create combinations and slants on the rules, in the same way no online shooter game ever matches what the game developers plan.

The reason is simple

Human beings are dicks

Not everyone i'll admit. Most people, particularly on this lounge seem to be good people. But inevitably if the option for something dickish exists that might let someone win, someone will use it. Glitches and unfair tactics in online game, insane combinations in table top games.

People aregue "if its in the rules why not do it? Winnings the important thing". My argument is that just cos you can do it you shouldn't do it.

Its easier to come up with examples in online games than the tabletop game. (eg Battlefield 3 - Just cos you can fly your helicopter to the enemy base and steal their helicopters and airplanes, leaving them no real defense against you, doesn't mean you should) but the same can be said for people "breaking" tabletop games with bent strategies.

So end this comment/mini rant. As the say no plan survives contact with the enemy, and no gaming system survives contact with the player base. And the internet just makes thing worse.

[SotonShades]

True, but it is probably also fair to say that playtesters will nevergetthe oppertunity to test out every option and every combination, so may miss something that can be game breakingly powerful. With so many millions of us gamers out there, we are statisticly more likely to spot those combinations.

On top of all that; I don't know about you guys, but I am terrible at checking stuff I have written for mistakes. As Goatboy said, playtesters and game writers will always play their rules the way they understand them. Unless the wording is perfectly unambiguous, someone will at some point get the wrong impression and do it the wrong way. I challange anyone to write a ruleset as lengthy as the GW rulebooks and have everyword be unambiguous, so whethe r players mean to or not, some misconceptions are going to creep in. And THAT is where certain people start to take advantage. Everyone in the Rules Forum love the vagaries of language for that very reason

[DarkLink]

I just can't understand how they can miss some of the stuff that's so painfully obvious. It took all of a day for every single competitive GK player to realize 'holy @#$%, psyrifle dreads and psykotroke/rad grenades are @#%*ing amazing'. Play about one game and you realize that it holds true. I literally cannot understand how they can miss so much stuff like that.


Edit: Oh, and that Brotherhood Champions and two thirds of the Inquisitorial options are crap. The Inquisitorial options are painfully obvious. Why would anyone ever take Banishers, or a Ordos Hereticus Inquisitor?

And why have Crowe make Purifiers scoring? Purifiers are good enough to take on their own accord, why not make Purgation or Interceptor squads scoring because almost no one ever takes them? They're both good, they just compete for slots and there aren't points left after filling out the really good stuff. Those are pretty obvious internal balance issues that should have been caught.

[CrimsonTurkey]

And why have Crowe make Purifiers scoring?.

Because purifiers are cool and people will want to make armies of them. That's why. I seriously doubt that had anything to do with game design.

[juliusb]

I think the main problem with addressing balance in playtesting is that it's impossible over the long run. Let's compare 40K to chess:

1. Chess has no terrain; no advantages to either player.
2. Chess has only 1 "army", both players must use the same army.
3. Chess has fewer "unit types" in each army (6)
4. Chess has simpler rules; those 6 units types I mentioned only differ in movement.
5. Chess has 1 "mission type"
6. Chess doesn't use dice. *this is the most obvious difference but I list it last because the randomness of dice effects both players in 40k, therefore over the long run, it ought to balance out.

In this light, lets take these issues and compare them to 40K:

1. Playtesters can never account for ever terrain setup.
2. Playtesters cannot count on the infinite potential army variations that could be played. *Chess hasn't even worked out all of the potential games even with hundreds of years of analysis including supercomputers research.
3. Same as #2; too many unit types and variables.
4. After considering #s 1-3, 40K then lathers on special rules of all sorts. Also, to make them more interesting, they need to constantly push the envelope. IE, they start to mess with the structure of the game.
5. 40K has how many mission types? How many "house" or "Tourney" missions?
6. It's still dice-based. My Queen has never failed a check-mate because I rolled a 1.

40K is supposed to be fun and I totally understand that people are naturally competitive and they want to win. If "balance" is an issue for you, I seriously suggest you try competitive chess. I always laugh at opponents who get all bent out of shape with 40K balance. Admittedly, I play more chess than 40k because it's more of a battle of wits; however, it's difficult to get into the emotion and cinema of battle with pawns and rooks. 40K is much superior for storytelling, hobbying etc.

Long/short of it: if you want balance here are some suggestions:

1. Play Identical armies.
2. Play with "mirrored" terrain.
3. Remove as many "random" rules as possible; "run" moves are always 3" etc.
4. No Dice, use math to figure shooting/saves/CC etc. Remove scatter.

You see where I'm going here? True balance requires simplicity and that's not what 40K is about; it's about theatrics and overcoming unpredictable events; like war. Even with all of this chess still isn't balanced, there's an advantage to going first and there's no way around that in a turn-based system.

I'm not trying to end the debate, it's fun and that's why I'm here. But let's remember the situation with 40K and not blame the playtesters, they're task is literally impossible. As long as the game remains fun, they've done their job.

[Bean]

I just can't understand how they can miss some of the stuff that's so painfully obvious. It took all of a day for every single competitive GK player to realize 'holy @#$%, psyrifle dreads and psykotroke/rad grenades are @#%*ing amazing'. Play about one game and you realize that it holds true. I literally cannot understand how they can miss so much stuff like that.

You don't even have to play a game, really. Just reading the codex and knowing a bit about the game is enough to tell you that.

Anyway, OP's point is false, but fair to an extent. It is certainly possible to playtest a game perfectly, but it's true that the difficulty of playtesting a game sufficiently increases dramatically with its complexity--for 40k, a perfect playtesting would be effectively impossible (too much computing power required) and doing so sufficiently would likely take more effort than it's worth.

But some of the balance issues are so glaring that it clearly isn't a matter of them failing to playtest enough, it's a matter of them failing to have even a sort of basic capacity for evaluating the effects of their rules on the game. I don't doubt that they playtest some, but their results are so systemically flawed that it can't possibly have come from a cogent methodology applied to anything other than the most minimal degree.

They need to come up with a system for evaluating rules and then playtesting them--a system that makes sense and is applied far more thoroughly than it currently is. Frankly, I think they should invest in the development of a genetic 40k algorithm to handle their playtesting for them. That's the only way you're going to be able to test rules in anything approaching a significant number of possible circumstances.

[Soups]

It's tough to playtest properly when you have an internal and external force telling the GW design crew not to leak ANYTHING. And given an edition will be around for 5+ years, I don't think a 6 month preview ruleset would hurt the way a codex would, given only a small percent play a codex compared to 100% using the rulebook.

Which I believe is Gamesworkshop being, however well intentioned, blind to the fact that the game is no longer beer and pretzelz. There comes a point when you make a product for everyone that it becomes an actually popular thing, and have to decide. Keep it for the niche, or sell it to the teeming masses.

I think GW is stuck in marketing limbo. Video games and movies made about thier wonderful hobby, but still want thier most popular product to be something not taken seriously? A simple solution (after being looked through internally by the company) would be to have staff dedicated to FAQs and travel to Tournaments and see what the players are doing. It might be apple to oranges, but I think it's more grapefruit to oranges to look at how Magic: The Gathering, does thier bann/restricted list. Cards have static rules based off the game rules themselves, and are erratad or banned or edited to be played how intended. And are done regularly in an obvious way to show the customers there is a rhyme and reason. GW seems to do it randomly (stealth on one model=stealth for entire unit) or 5 years too long (Imp Guard platoons now get to deploy the whole thing in Dawn of War)