Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K: GW’s Metagame Thoughts – Looking Beyond the Data
Goatboy here with thoughts about the GW’s latest 40 meta data and what it all means.
This week GW started up with some Meta watch goodness on the 40k side of things with a breakdown of the armies and their “win” percentage. I am happy about this as again it shows GW does care about the fairness of the game. It’s nice to think that maybe I get to the table and have a chance with whatever army I take.
What About Player Skill?
My issue seems to be while just taking the wins and losses is good – but what about any metric based on player skill? I know that is a harder thing to judge but a new player taking the best list (maybe bar initial book release Nids) is not going to win a lot of their games. There is a lot of layers of nuance to make sure you are paying enough attention to the scoring aspects of the game that a new player will most likely forget. Heck even older players like myself forget all the time too.
So how the heck do we truly get a feeling or a place where we know an army might be too good? I remember that GW was talking about building a “war room” of tournament winners to help guide their FAQ’s/Seasons/Etc. I haven’t heard if that is still a thing or are they waiting to get it all together. Like if you ask a lot of the better players they all have thoughts on what is the best army. Heck – if you track what a player is playing and it is one of the “best” army and it wrecks everyone at a big event – it might be too good.
What is a Good Win Rate?
Which again leads me to start to wonder what is the optimum win rate? Is 50% really the best way to judge an army if it is in the right place? If you see Ad Mech it is really low but is that more so a bunch of loyal metal heads who are not the best playing it all the time? Is it truly a set of rules that don’t work to well or is it just the whole – early book with bad secondaries issue? What really makes the army truly bad beyond just crap rules?
It again points me towards the idea of trying to truly track player skill in some meaningful way beyond just ITC or whatever groups ranking they want to be. I don’t even know if that is truly worth it for GW too. I look at how AOS feels like there is a much more above board controlling group for FAQ’s and testing that feels a bit left out on the 40k side of things but again – it’s hard to really grasp ahold of and be like – this needs to be better so my models are good again.
9th Edition’s time may be almost up…
Does 9th’s Meta Even Matter
And heck this all could be moot to discuss as we wait to see if 10th is going to wreck the world and start over again. Overall from the data there is a few issue still floating in the game on a basic level – things that dataslate update might not fix enough. We’ll just have to wait and find out when the next quarter update is released.
The Road to Balance
Here are the things at a basic level I would do to fix up the game. These are not pinpoint thoughts on specific armies (without massive datasheet rewrites it is hard to “fix” armies with too good of units beyond hoping points evens it out) but instead broader thoughts to help the game out.
- Remove the ability to take multiple secondary missions from your own armies section in the Nephilim update. This is probably the biggest factor in letting 2 armies run away with scoring in the game and leaves their “rules” alone to see if the army is actually good or just the way they score the game too good.
- Update Missions to have a Secondary option both armies have to play for as part of the 3 pack of Secondaries.
- Change all Shadow Operations secondaries to allow for scoring at the end of the game if the player went second.
Those 3 things would simplify some of the games in that there are really only “2” missions that are different from each other for the round. It eliminates those with armies that have 2 oops I get 15 secondary points to easy. It forces a battle over one of the secondaries – especially if you build into it that it is something both armies have to engage/interact to deal with. It also allows some armies secondaries to be able to work all rounds of the game instead of hoping to go first to get your 12-15 points needed.
These solutions aren’t perfect and does take some reworking of the missions but I feel it would be a simple enough set of changes that hits all the armies at once instead of just pinpoint changes and hoping it brings an army in line.
What are your thoughts? Do you think this would work well enough and let the game sync up a lot more? Is it worth it to change it up?
