That's basically the remit of an Army List Champion in a nutshell.

The Marine Champion has been absent for a decent chunk of this year (As were all the ERC), so nothing got tested in an organised manner, as with most years with the Marine list, frankly.

I doubt the ERC have the time or motivation available to organise a second "playtests" compendium.

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Yes, the percentages are strong, but I think the small overall numbers* you cite support Moscovian's point. How much can you take away from such a small sample size?

*EDIT: yeah, not literally just 8 out of 10, but still kind of small, even in a small community.

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That 40 people put their hands in the air.

Which is four or five times as many people who get involved in the "talky debate" threads.

You can also take away the fact that the loudest or most cliqueish group isn't getting the biggest voice.

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that's fine, but the poll wasn't to see if people wanted change it was to see what to change the critical to or to leave it as it is and no options scored over 50%. In fact no option even got 40% which I think is far from conclusive. By voting a second time all you are showing is which minority option people will vote for when their preferred option isn't available which hardly constitutes a mandate. For that matter "no change" scored the same percentage as the warhound immediately blows up, yet only options which change the critical appear in the second poll. Regardless, this change has nothing to do with balance; it's change for the sake of change.

Just because the majority speaks doesn't make what they are saying the best solution.

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-Vaaish

Have you read the dozen or so threads touching on warhounds in the SM forum? regardless of the validity of polls it clearly is warranted to consider a change of some sort

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Steve, I've read through them all and I fail to see how changing the warhound critical across the board will balance the warhound in the marine list. Even if somehow it does magically make the warhound balanced there, what about the effect of the change in IG or AMTL? I've yet to see one post that describes exactly how an event that occurs 16% of the time on a dc3 WE will have any effect on the warhound fulfilling it's role any differently than it already does in the marine army. You have higher odds of killing the Warhound outright than the critical doing anything at all.

The problem can't be activation count since even if you manage to prevent the second warhound from being taken you can always used the points to take more marine formations. You can't even effectively limit it by upping the cost to a ridiculous level. Outside of changing the allies percentage to 15% or hard capping the warhound in a marine list you can't limit it to a single warhound or no warhounds which seems to be the desire.

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-Vaaish

Effectively Warhounds are very slightly overpowered for their points - but gain a synergy effect within the Marine list that makes them slightly more overpowered and at the same time the best choice for a given points level. Now the warhound critical doesnt really solve all the problems but it does make the Warhound slightly worse for its points in a reasonably fluffy way.

Basically in a standard Marine tournament list, the Warhounds alpha strike against my opponent going for an ideal target of AA but if that is unachievable just aim to break a smaller support formation and drop my oponents activation count. At this point my opponent will be forced to counter attack the Warhounds as they are too dangerous to leave running around (tying up activations for other marine formations to exploit).

Unfortunately what initially looks like a weakness becomes a strength here for warhounds - they are very easy to break, but once broken all they do is run back 60cm to a position of safety and then rally on a 3+ (with reroll which in a Marine army you will invariably keep for this task). Then in the later game their Void shields make it difficult for an opponents now battered formations to apply enough concentrated force to actually kill them.

Basically the critical makes it a bit less predictable for the Warhound player, as after that initial alpha strike if my opponent gets lucky and causes a critical my warhound will end up dead and not just break backwards as I want. Same applies in the late game a single hit may critical and take out the warhound so they are just not quite as reliable and predictable.

At the same time the critical doesn't weaken them so much that they become unusable in say a Guard army which doesnt gain as much from a warhound (other than its basic efficiency for its points).

People don't like debates because they're noisy and unclear.

People don't like polls because there's no guarantee that people have considered their choices.

I am interested in knowing what magical method we are going to be using in future to determine people's opinions and consensus on those opinions.

I don't think these polls somehow force the NetERC to do anything. I'm unclear on how they can. Indeed, the Marine AC has recently made it clear that polls are one of the many things he ignores when making his decisions.

That said, they are good, quick, relatively objective indicators of what people think in a larger group. How people use that is up to them. More importantly, they stopped people complaining about debates for a while and put some numbers behind the various positions those debates had espoused. They cleared the ground.

Personally, I had expected that if votes for a change were significant enough (60%+), further discussion should ensue and Hena should probably actually pay attention to that discussion.

If votes for change were divided (but overwhelmingly for change), then further discussion might be appropriate again, then another, narrower poll to try and narrow down people's opinions.

If votes for a particular option were overwhelming (80%+), then the NetERC should consider the change seriously, and have a rather better explanation for why they did not make it than "we don't like polls".

If votes were less than about 60% for change, then we should leave the subject alone and bring it up at another time.

In none of those cases did I ever expect the polls would serve as sole dictators of what course the Marines would take. I did, however, expect that people might try and use them productively, rather than complaining about them conceptually.

In regards to what the Marine poll results indicate:

I'd say the Predator and Tacticals poll both indicate a desire for further testing of those options. I'd say that thus, further testing would be appropriate - as E&C says, the lists in the 'draft' have been stable for over a year now.

The ATSKNF poll and Warhound costing poll feature a general agreement that change is needed, but no real agreement on what change should be. I would say the appropriate course there would be to have some further discussion on the matter, then do other, narrower polls. If no clear preferred choice emerges, then decide what course is necessary (whether to leave it alone or to test several different options). If one option does emerge, then test it accordingly.

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I agree with Mosc that, while polls may be usefull to indicate that something need to change, they can be very misleading unless the changes are well understood. Even then, the unforseen impacts of implementing several apparently disconnected changes can produce undesirable effects.

However, IMHO one of the biggest issues here is the confusion over which lists to use, and which amendments are 'official', both of which colour the debates and polls themselves. I well remember Sotec stating that he got to the point of ignoring almost all input from outside his group because of the wide variety of circumstances that coloured those comments (different sized tables, different terrain densities, etc).

I understand Neal's aim to have a single NetERC version and the concerns over how the multiplicty of polls appears to outsiders, but also have to agree with SN above and ask whether they will actually have the influence over the ERC that is apparently desired - after all, the role of AC and ERC would seem to be to make balanced choices based on the advice of others as well as personal experience (and perhaps some polls? ).

And As other have said, while there appears to be a mandate to change the Warhound, it is far less clear just what changes should be applied.

I'd agree on that - people should always have the "none of the above" or "no" option.

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Polls sometimes assume certain things, espcially when worded as "What change would you like to see done to the [Widget]?"
...It's right up there with the question, "How often do you beat your wife?"

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It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I've got my Milkbone underwear on.

Yes, and? Of course there are bad ways to do polls. There are bad ways to do anything. It doesn't invalidate them wholesale.

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And that's it. I understand it doesn't invalidate them. Just pointing out a quality of some polls that some people may not have picked up on. I think polls have their place, for certain. But Neal's original point seems to have been lost in all this chit-chat.

Neal (correct me if I am wrong) was stating his opinion that these current polls are not serving any positive function to making the Space Marine solidly fixed in one place. This (IMO correctly) presumes that the main focus should be on locking the list down, not on dialing in to subtleties.

These recent polls give the illusion that the SM list is both in a state of flux and out of whack; two things that simply aren't true. I concede there are changes that possibly should be made, but those should be put off while the list is made 'official' by the NetERC(again). Right now the list plays fine. But out of the half dozen proposals being tossed about, I don't see a single game changer. To take it one more step, I don't even see all of the changes being an absolute game changer. The list plays fine!

How exactly is the NetERC supposed to get anything official done if people keep poking at the lists? It will never happen. Ever. And then somebody will start complaining about how the NetERC hasn't done their job in getting the lists finalized and the whole dang thing will start all over again.

IMO an acknowledgement that the polls indicate some possibly needed changes for the next edition of the army lists should be good enough to get us through all this. Publishing the army lists doesn't automatically stop development (it certainly didn't for the Necron...).

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It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I've got my Milkbone underwear on.

The NetERC hasn't poked at the lists for about a year now. The Draft list has remained unchanged. There has been discussion, but nothing has happened. And considering how NetERC scheduling seems to end up working out, I don't think asking people to only discuss changes to the list within certain time periods is either fair or wise.

The list has sat for a while. People want to try some other changes. We have two (or perhaps even three) months where we could test those changes. Maybe we should do so?

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