The following is an entirely reasonable question that I think I gave an entirely reasonable answer to. Enjoy.

Why do you think that the rules are crap? They didn't change that much since third edition.

The codex rules didn't get easier either.

I think the rules have had randomisation injected to lower the skill ceiling and create an artificially level playing field. If you can only ever reach so high because of mechanical limitations in the game then once you hit that level you merely wait for others to reach it also. In 40k's situation specifically you had dice for critically 5 things - shoot to hit, strength to wound, wound saves (armour/invulnerable etc) and then vehicle damage. Charging in 5th was 6" charge for infantry and walkers, 12" for beasts or characters with special rules. Morale checks.

Now we enter 6th edition - vehicles and buildings get damage charts reworked, exploding a vehicle made a technical roll of 7, exploding a building also harder. Charges get made random (I leave it up to you to decide if predictable charge distance was a negative factor [i]pro tip; it wasn't, it's part of what made melee armies work since you could semi-reliably position yourself for charging. In today's game you can literally fail a 3" charge, you have roughly a 25% failure rate to charge distances under 5". You have a 75% failure rate to charge over 10".[/i]). Psychic powers had their failure rates increased by virtue of deny the witch shenanigans. Lots more examples. I dont need to patronise you with a comprehensive list.

Codexes weren't simplified - let's say I agree with you, but bring it back around. Introducing more random variables stamps out the peaks and troughs of player performance, eliminates the bell curve through the law of large numbers and allows GW to post official figures about win/loss ratios being within 40/55%. It was used 4 years ago and I bought it then but now I've seen where they're going with it and I no longer like it.

If anything DE are bucking the trend with their codex progression from 5th->7th.

PFP made predictable and static. Poison weapons being the great equalizer that MC and special characters fear.

And yet still it is bloated with random elements. Let's make something clear - I don't believe 40k is a game about rolling dice, dice poker and craps exist for that. I believe 40k is about two army builds being tested against one another with an enormous amount of variation made possible by dice. But that is a contradictory statement; once dice take up too much of the gameplay it breaks down the viability of special weapons, special units, tactics and strategic plays. People start hedging their bets one of two ways - predictable performance with either 3+/4+ hit rolls etc, or they start banking on being favoured by the extreme performance swings of super powered highly random abilities (like elements of the daemon codex, CSM codex, psyker power generation etc etc). I'll look at a couple of specific examples right here:

Combat drugs - technically all of these are useful but some of them aren't worth it compared to other results against given enemies. It would be better if you just paid a flat unit tax (1 or 2pts per model, with all models in a unit either having drugs or not having drugs, ICs get to choose for themselves) and then choose what drug you took before the game started with all units using drugs that game being required to use the same drugs. In other words everyone uses Grave Lotus, or Hypex but not a mix of the two. "oh but that would be OP then" no it wouldn't because randomising whether you get an appropriate benefit or not vs just outright buying the benefit for an additional cost is the just the same thing but in a less sequitous method of approach. Also giving your [i]whole army[/i] combat drugs would quickly become too expensive and you would start sacrificing it on some units to free up points for more warm bodies.

Crucible of malediction - I guarantee you've never seen a player use this more than once. And here's why - http://statistics.about.com/od/ProbHelpandTutorials/a/Probabilities-For-Rolling-Three-Dice.htm
Instead of just giving the weapon 9" of range and calling it a day, they make it totally random which for a once-per-game weapon that only affects an extremely specific kind of enemy that you had to pre-buy before the game even began and at not insignificant cost I find to be credulous. Maybe you bank on hitting at 10" and crash your IC in to a group of jetbike warlocks or whatever, you fire the weapon off and only get 5" at a probability of 3%, you hit like what, 4 of them? And then another time you're getting way too close for comfort to some grey knights, fire off at full 18" on a probability of 0.5% and curse your luck because the law of averages is fucking you right in the ass right now, with 2W models soaking up damage and maintaining full combat effectiveness with the same damage output at 50% Wounds as at 100% Wounds compared to a big squad of 1W models that you could easily have killed half of them if you had the statistically average roll just simply there for your use instead of having to roll for it. Never mind it's a shooting attack, nevermind you only get to use it once.

By reducing predictability they reduce variety - some units and weapons especially those which are too random just get dropped completely. GW says wildly swinging games where winning or losing isn't a surety until the end of the last turn is fun - yeah I bet if you're the credulous type who doesn't believe that having the better team and the better strategies should give you the higher chance of winning. But the thing is people already do compensate for the winds of fate by buttoning down and making cookie-cutter lists that lack unit variety and hinge on 1, maybe 2, maybe 3 inherent properties of constituent units to flatten the randomisation and introduce the predictability they need to formulate a winning army list.

Another debate with someone who completely missed the point. The point is that kids are a victim too, being deliberately targeted over other market demographics because they're easier to sell to, thus dragging down the complexity of the game (from a player stand point) and introducing more and more randomness to compensate for a lack of skill through destroying the actual upper capacity of players potential skill level.

Children playing games? Horrors! Pushing little men around a tabletop is obviously an activity for mature adults that has no place in it for grubby little urchins. Seriously though, whence comes this contempt for kids? I don't know about you, but I used to be one, back when dinosaurs walked the earth. Most of us began gaming as children, our hands and faces always sticky with jam somehow, even when we hadn't eaten any jam. It helped us to develop into the clever, charming, and sexually attractive adults we are today.

We need to get kids playing these games if the hobby is to survive to another generation. Otherwise they'll all grow up grumpy and dull of mind, and become estate agents, corporate lawyers, and mid-level managers. Is that what you want?

I'm personally not disappointed with the current state of 40K at all. I think it's the best that it's ever been, it's just that my favourite faction has been excluded from this Rennaisance. GW has completely lost interest in all things Dark Eldar. Even their line of miniatures is gone from stores. This isn't the first time that has happened, but it's still disappointing.

Even so, I'm pretty sure I could still beat a child, if that were any consolation!

I don't have contempt for the kids, I have contempt for this game being dumbed down to appeal to a broader audience which is something it didn't need since tons of kids and teenagers bought the products already. GW has officially moved away from being a games company because of this; they know their game can't withstand scrutiny so they handwave it away.

It's no secret; without the GAME portion of 40k they'd have far fewer customers. It's also noteworthy that as little as 18 months ago their annual financial report smugly boasted they (paraphrasing) 'do not collect customer feedback', that they 'know what their customer base wants' even though they now earn as little money as they did in 2007. Funnily enough they've now started collecting customer feedback. Probably because it has at last been made unavoidable due to forecasts of closure within 10 years.

So this game makes everyone with an impressionable mind feel like a complete badass, just look at the gross verbosity used inside EVERY codex, EVERY fluff piece. It's nauseating for me and completely strips itself of any credibility because there is so much thesaurus abuse in each paragraph. I don't think there is enough room in a codex for so much crap but somehow they squeeze it in - all these loosely tied together events with a hair-string narrative and a desensitising glut of rich language. FW does it better - their books are tied to events and follow a cohesive plot with in most cases a beginning, middle and end, compared to GW's inhouse efforts which rub off to me as bullshit vertical slices that do a disservice to each army by drowning their character and culture under an ocean of anecdotal historical events. We don't learn anything about these factions aside from the already universally known stuff and then get told they are badasses and these are the events that prove how/why for 30 pages.

You know what this game needs more than -just simply more kids- buying and playing? It needs more adults, like Fritz and Jake the Mountain, guys who are actually socially adjusted and fun to be around, people who actually have their own disposable income to use on luxury products like tabletop miniatures.  People who can rationally debate certain points without getting lost in a maze of relativism. I really hope you *enjoy* playing against all those kids because that's what you'll be getting more of until the games internal consistency is taken seriously and actually balanced towards people.

Did you actually watch the video? He even says too many random elements in game disproportionately favours weaker players (in video games and board games [and by extension tabletop games]) because it lowers the skill ceiling and undermines the power of skill by literally scamming you out of situations where you should have won.

 Posted most recently on The Dark City; a fan site dedicated to dark eldar players and their unique army. As the reader can see from what I am saying however, things are getting pretty damned tenuous at Nottingham, with the company Games Workshop moving away from ensuring their game (which they refuse to acknowledge as being a major vessel for model sales despite the correlations between an ailing gaming system and falling profits for the last 8 years) is balanced and correctly caters towards niche armies that rely on strategy, planning and expert tactical choices and towards a game where rolling more dice means a more equal distribution of wins and losses between players, *suggesting* to the unwary and unsavvy among us that the game is balanced because the trending of wins and losses has closed the gap and therefore that increasingly random gameplay results is good for the game in ignorance to the frustration and rage it causes the players who used to be able to talk about the game seriously with outsiders, players who can't do that now anymore because their hobby is a joke and the game is designed to cater for children who can't play tabletop wargames very well.

I'd like to weigh in here briefly and say that BDobbins did an excellent series of videos on some of the concepts we're witnessing here in 40k and have been witnessing over the last 3 editions.
[youtube]UZ5BpeHVTWY[/youtube]

Some of the salient points later on in the video are about how randomising matchmaking, loot drops and item quality through an extremely reductive system (which is directly relevant to 40k and I'll demonstrate in just a moment) did great damage to the game through infuriating a large portion of its playerbase most notably older players who have more alternatives and life experience and through this lost a great portion of its potential customer base. Much of what is said in the video predicates on the team at Bungie relying on pre-orders for 'collectors editions' to make the bulk of their money and that this is not an unreasonable assumption. Destiny marketing was famously 500million and it made all of that back within the first week.

Getting back to the parallels between destiny and 40k I believe they both function on one or two fundamental balancing principles.

1. Randomisation. Randomising everything to the Nth degree guarantees that bad players win occasionally, that little kids who aren't good at all can still come out breaking even or even winning against better players and better lists because randomisation of dice rolls saved their asses.

2. Reductivism. Every single activity in the game is now getting its own set of rules and sub-rules. These rules have had more randomisation injected (notice a trend yet?) even when its not completely appropriate. By reducing scenarios into easily compartmentalised chunks and then spinning them on the lottery wheel of chance you help to even out the success/failure rates of players and force an arbitrary sense of balance on the game. What GW game designers have done essentially is this: they've taken every army that could conceivably succeed based on tactics and nuance and reduced their capacity to rely on sound strategy for victory. This reduction in viability for specialist units especially fragile ones like dark eldar leads to identifying units that are the most effective and spamming them. Caveat emptor; this has always already happened to a degree yes, but predominantly because some units like 5th ed spacewolves and GK being badly designed by a bad game developer. The units we see spammed on the board aren't even necessarily the ones with the best special rules. Typically it's a saturation of high toughness, high strength models with one or two gimmicks inherent to their unit type. Flying daemon princes, most gargantuan creatures, (jet)biker blobs, terminator/centurion blobs, mounted wolflord spam, jumppack infantry spam etcetera etcetera.

These two factors combine to create the modern 40k we have today. If you haven't yet watched that video fully yet then you could stand to do so now to really see how it all ties together. The reduction of content upfront in a codex being supplemented in other books (effectively tabletops version of microtransactions), special pay-to-win creatures and rules, the breaking down of cohesion via unbound lists, the breaking down of victorious strategies by implementing more and more random elements in order to make the game more accessible for the 11-14 year olds that we see in the stores everywhere, with almost noone over 21 to be seen ever except for the staff. The erosion of the official tournament scene as an attempt to circumvent criticism for a broken game.

If you ever get the feeling like you've lost interest in the game it's not because you have - it's because you haven't swallowed the koolaid and pandered to the companies anti-consumer corporate strategy. If you feel like you've been consistently robbed of wins by the dice [b][u]it's because you actually have, by design, been robbed of wins[/u][/b] because GW doesn't want you to always beat the kids at your FLGS every time. And this frustrates many players especially older players who consciously or sub-consciously recognise they're being scammed and refuse to tolerate it any more, so they leave the hobby and leave behind the bulk percentage of customers who are typically younger and more willing to accept at face value that the game they are playing is balanced and fair.

When threads like this can demonstrate that within merely 3 editions it went from being pretty balanced to just an outright joke, not taken seriously by the community at large because of it's enduring association with little kids and toys that are becoming increasingly visually dense to compensate for the diminishing number of uses for the models on the table.