Warhammer: One Big Issue With The Metawatch
I really like the Metawatch that Warhammer Community generates. But I think there’s one major place they can improve it.
Every couple of weeks Games Workshop puts out a new Metawatch article for both Warhammer: 40,000 and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. They are accompanied by a video which is typically done in an interview style with two people discussing the respective state of the game. The videos are informative and they give you a lot of the “behind the scenes” reasoning for whatever changes are on the way for the coinciding updates.
But what I’m sure everyone scrolls down to see, at least at first, is the win-rate data. Hey, I do it too! It’s big, it’s visual, and it conveys a lot of info about the overall state of things very well. Or does it?
The Metawatch Problem
This is my one big grip with the Metawatch and the win-rate data presented like this: It’s very generalized. On one hand, it kinda needs to be. There’s a lot of armies to cover and a lot of games to sort. We also have an idea where they are pulling the data from and know that the sheer volume of games being played is…massive. So, this is probably the better option to showcase very high level trends in the games.
On the other hand, let’s take an army like the Adeptus Astartes from above. They are sitting at a respectable 48% win rate, right? But is that accurate to the actual army? What I mean is, how many different versions of an Adeptus Astartes army can you make currently? The answer: A lot. We also don’t know how many games have been played with each specific army. But that’s another issue.
The main point is that the win-rate data is good and all but it’s also not granular enough to really dig into what’s actually going on with that particular army. Now, again, these charts are super high level and if you watch the accompanying videos you do get more info. Sometimes they even go into particular armies and builds or specific units that are “issues” they can point to.
Here’s another example. The Slaves to Darkness army is a relatively newer Battletome. Typically, when we see a new book like this the win-rates shoot up. But they are sitting at a comparatively lower-than-expected 47% win-rate. That’s really odd. GW’s solution was to cut some of the points for specific units.
But is the overall faction actually at a 47% win-rate or perhaps there’s some internal balance that tilting the data one way. Because if you’ve looked at the book then you know there’s actually 6 sub-factions within that book and each one can build and play VERY differently. It might not be as …versatile as say the Space Marines are but there’s definitely some variance within each book and their sub-factions.
Again, we don’t know how many total games are being played and we don’t have specifics on which sub-factions are being played in the GW Metawatch articles. That’s the problem with the Metawatch that I have. But again, it needs to be very high level because those articles are meant to be approachable and digestible to the widest audience. So I understand the issue. At the same time I would like to see those win-rates split out a bit more and based on sub-factions.
If they can split out the Orruks in to Bonesplittaz, Ironjawz, and Kruleboyz then why can’t they split out things like Stormcasts (Scions of the Storm) vs Stormcasts (Stormkeep)? I mean, do get that the infographic would probably be like…4 time the size, so…yeah. Maybe not the best option.
It’s really a granular vs generic thing…and there’s not an easy fix.
