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.