seraphon are very rarely OP. what we are is anti Meta and people don't know/like playing againsed anti meta. that means even if we are bad(see the last year or so of our first ed book) people will hate us.
Just thought I'd throw this out here, in case people still think Seraphon are OP
Of course that will probably change when the new book comes out.
The goal isn't to win its to make the other player say fuck you. That cathartic sense of victory is all we need
we are basically playing a blue deck even if we wish we where playing a green deck
And this is why talking about OP/UP is kinda pointless when it concerns fun. Things like being anti-meta, breaking the general flow of the game, lacking interaction, or simply ruining their prefered playstyle by being a complete hard-counter are much more frustrating for opponents than an army which simply has a somewhat "OP" winrate.
It also helps that top players generally have different priorities,they might even like the things that casual players find frustrating or unfair as these things tend to provide interesting challenges at a high level.
People are weird....
not pointless you just shouldn't listen to people who don't know what they are talking about.
... yes control strats have been a part of basically every strategy game ever created. whether new players enjoy playing againsed it is irrelevant as it is a normal healthy part of every game. keeping power strategies in check and being the entire arm of opponent interaction is important.
yes they know how to play the game.
It is a statistic that is correlated with far too many confounders, most of which are impossible to control for, and a good chunk of which aren't even particularly clear. Making it basicly impossible to base anything of value on.
While some control is fine, and even needed as a counter-mechanic towards more straightforward brute force strategies, it becomes an issue when it allows you to flat out break the normal gameflow. Which can be a difficult thing to balance.
1) There's plenty of competitive players who are absolutely terrible at the game.
nice word salid. let me fix it for you. "i don't think win rates are a valuable statistic" there you go much more in line with your veiws and now people can read it.
define " normal game flow".
if all it takes is mass chaff to make your entire army un effective for an entire game then you have more to worry about then "normal game flow"
granted
right they know how to play the game.
then this is probably not the game for them since a large chunk of doing well in ... well any game with movement in it is positioning.
right they are people who understand the game and care enough about it to get better at it.
All of those are perfectly normal english words....
I was talking in broad terms here to make the point that a good game relies on a solid core, which creates a certain flow that occurs consistently in every game and provides rules that everyone needs to obey. While there is some wiggle room for exceptions and special rules, if you mess too much with that core it generally ends up frustrating players because that tends to feel like the exception is allowed to cheat (e.g. teleport mechanics are a great example of something that can frustrate players easily because they break the normal flow of movement)
It results in a fundamentally different game compared playing against a "normal" army which has a healthy balance of different troop types/roles. And it changes it the game so much that it no longer is fun.
Again, skill, care and understanding have nothing to do with being a competitive player or not.
entirely untrue. it is the biggest most effective measurement of power available to us and is used by EVER competitive game for balancing. just because you think it's bad doesn't mean it is.
ok define AoSs "normal game flow" and how basic things like screens and unbinding ruin it.
ah so we don't break normal game flow since every thing we do(bar teleporting/summoning but thats not the anti meta things we do and aren't very good) is in the core rules
we have a balanced troop type with a good coverage of different play styles and good hero representation. even full skinks builds usually bring monsters and utility units.
in what way. you have yet to establish how we play the game differently. the anti meta stuff that make us strong are 1 good wizards that let us unbind (no the map wide unbind doesn't matter) 2. star venom giving us solid and flexible anti armor play. and 3. very good assassination options. all of the above are completely normal things that every army can and does do we just do all of then at the expense of most every thing else.
yes they do.
they care more about the game yes. they care enough about it to learn how to play well and to get better at it.
then narrative is right there for those people, we don't have to balance the competitive side of the game around people who don't want to play competitively.
Everyone uses it because it's the easiest statistic to measure, and it's understandable by people who know nothing about statistics, additionally, it intuitively looks like a 50% winrate should be "healthy", so it's easy to get people to agree that this should be the end-goal. It's a nice easy to understand number. And it is nice and easy to understand because it's a gross oversimplification of an incredibly complex system...
Yeah, I give up. If this is the basic stance you're going to approach this discussion from then the entire thing is pointless. You can't just view them in a vacuum as completely separate sides, the different aspects influence each other. Nor can you claim that competitive players care "more" or any of that nonsense.
probably because it IS a useful and readily exesable metric that DOES give a good example of how strong a thing is. it's why usage rates and win rates are the main two metrics used by most game developers when balancing a game.
as opposed to using what? we have been asking you for years for a objective alternative but you never present one.
again feel free to provide a alternative that is both measurable, easily available, and more useful.
they are separate sides, they are treated as such by pretty much every one.
of course i can. it's true of ANY competitive game you HAVE to care more about a game to invest the hours necessary to study and learn a game well enough to play it well. this is true about chess this is true about card games it's true about video games and it's true about wargames.
as opposed to what? listening to the people who play maybe once ever 1-3 months and regularly forget basic game rules? i do not value the opinions of people who don't understand a thing. if the rules of the game bother a person so much they can use the non competitive version of the game and play narrative.
Dude, as long as you refuse to accept that the only difference between a competitive player and non-competitive player is how they approach the game, that both sides have important insights, and that it says absolutely nothing about skill, knowledge, understanding, or dedication to the game, this entire discussion is pointless.
Useage rates are slightly more informative, or well, it's a lot easier to check for confounders making it possible to determine if an outlier is actually caused by a problem. Still not terribly informative if you don't check for confounders though.
1) I've repeatedly given you examples of various measures, rules, and indications, good designers use to determine if something fits in their game.
not going to except what isn't true, competitive players regularly put hundreds if not thousands of hours more into a thing they study it they practice it they CARE more about it.
so you say.
ooooor it's not some weird conspiracy and they use it because it IS useful. frost frog uses it Blizzard uses it Konomi uses it Nintendo use it valve used to use it back when they still made games ect. ect. ect.
um yes there are all variables that can be tweaked to balance a unit but they are not a indicator of whether or not a thing is balanced
such as?
well yeah but thats not what i asked for. i asked for a measurable readily available and better then win rates method to judge balance. im still waiting on your answer.
hence the need for a objective standard. just because you think something is unfair doesn't mean it is so we need a way to determent when balance is off so we can fix it.
no which one is right is based on how well both strategies work. we need a way to tell what is and is not successful there for... win rates.
