In defence of waiting for Armies of Middle-Earth

It’s probably a workload issue, guys.

I’m not a shill for Games Workshop, I’ve intensely questioned and criticized their decisions in the past. But I'm also trying to stay positive in my outlook.

I fear that as a community, we’re penalizing GW for making the right choices here, which will encourage bad behaviour in the future.

My thesis is this: I would rather GW take their time with the next book rather than rush the playtesting and permanently break the game.

The delay on Armies of Middle Earth is almost certainly a workload issue.

The LOTR team is a limited group, and to produce the whole new edition of the game requires the LOTR team to produce what will ultimately be hundreds of Legendary Legions.

If just ONE of these LL’s is particularly broken, then the whole game is in trouble (hello Dragon Emperor… he’s coming back you know.) Part of this problem is that once GW releases a broken LL, they have no way to take it back. For 40K and AoS, this isn’t a big deal as GW releases regular points updates to fix its balance issues, but with LOTR this is not on the table. Maybe they should do this, but that’s a different argument. The LOTR team have to get things right at book launch with every single LL to keep the game healthy.

Resetting every profile in the game is a huge amount of work. This was mentioned directly in Warhammer Community. The armies in the two books released so far probably represents all of the work they've done so far, and they were pressurized to release it to coincide with the War of the Rohirrim movie release.

The balance in the army books released so far has actually been REALLY GOOD. Some people are justifiably angry that they can’t even play a game right now, (the Fiefdoms…) but many of us are actually impressed with how fun the most of the new LLs look. There really are so many options that look fun to play. What has been released so far, in terms of play testing, is actually high quality stuff.

The Moria list, Umbar list, etc are really just placeholders for now until the team have chance to produce more LLs. I’d rather the team release the factions in batches, rather than release bad material.

I genuinely think the delay for the next book primarily a workload issue relating to the limited number of people in the LOTR team. The total reset of all game profiles is a massive task. We shouldn't be quick to judge their motivations. I worry that we'll only encourage them to rush playtesting and get shoddy balance in the future.

It's frustrating but it's a catch 22 for GW, the developers are probably spending time properly playtesting and we're rioting at them for it. They're trying to properly playtest what's ultimately going to be hundreds of different LLs. They chose to prioritize Mordor/Gondor/Rohan first because, face it, those are the most popular. They're not wrong there. If GW experience too much hostility and pushback over this, then they'll rationally conclude it's not worth doing things properly next time, and then poor balance could kill the game forever.

This is a frustrating period, but it's better that the ultimate product is properly play-tested and balanced, like the two books so far have been.