Reading through a thread on the Armada board about the future of these two games got me thinking about ways to maintain balance and avoid power creep got me to thinking:

Arguably, the biggest issue that FFG faces regarding balance is the physical cards with actual printed costs. Hearthstone or any "bideo" game can tweak, buff, and nerf to their heart's content. A cardboard game can't, right? I think they could... not sure if they will. (or should for that matter)

If FFG were to launch X-wing right now, knowing what they know. Would they be willing to provide all the existing cards and cardboard but without a printed points cost? Instead use an app similar to the existing squadron builders for all point calculation. This would be controversial sure but they are doing something kinda sorta similar with X-com.

This would allow much cleaner and more flexible methods for balancing the game as the meta changes. And, honestly, how many x-wing players don't already use an electronic squadron builder already? They could also provide an up-to-date pdf file for all the ludites out there that refuse to use any devices powered by devil-lightning.

Honestly, I would be surprised if such an option was not at least considered for Armada. It simply is not feasible to perfectly balance a game from the very beginning.

Would you be bothered if the bottom right corner of your upgrade cards just contained a code say XW 1 for rookie pilot or TORP 1 for Proton Torpedoes and your point cost would be calculated electronically?

....and then you get to an event and find out that the points cost of one of the ships in your list went up two days ago and you didn't get the app update..... and you can no longer run that list. sounds great!

Not everyone is plugged into the Matrix. This would essentially mean the game would not be playable 'out of the box' by itself without also having and using a 'secret decoder ring' to make it all work. Sorry to say but very simply, this wouldn't fly.

Isn't this pretty much how it works in Warhammer, but with a paper book instead of a pixle book?

Yeah, I don't like the idea of using an app for everything. If they were to launch a gen2 (also extremely unlikely) they'd just reprint cards with more appropriate costs

If you want a video game, play a video game.

...So then I would need to buy DLC to play my board games.

To put it simply, the cost of doing this is not worth the benefit.

X-Wing has become too popular to pull this off without confusing and frustrating a lot of players, even if they made the reboot free to download and print and fully compatible with all models and chits.

They are pretty much doing this with Armada though. I consider Armada to be the current designers at FFG's way of saying "this is how we would have designed X-Wing if we had been here from the start".

To clarify, I'm not suggesting any changes to the game that exists. I'm curious if FFG would/should consider something like this for a future release or a hypothetical release if X-wing were to launch in say 2016 instead of 2012. As a designer, it would make "future-proofing" the game much more manageable.

Honestly, I would be surprised if such an option was not at least considered for Armada. It simply is not feasible to perfectly balance a game from the very beginning.

And yet, the game was very balanced with Wave 1. Yes, the swarm was dominant, but it was hardly a play swarm or go home situation.

No offense, but this statement just reeks of what is currently wrong with current AAA video games. People have learned to accept a sub par product at release and wait for it to get better. Applying such a "strategy" to the fairly niche boardgame/miniature crowd is not going to work. It is lazy design. No, there won't be perfect balance. You just have to accept that as a reality, and work as hard as you can to prevent bad situations from happening. Having an option to just say, nope let's try it at this point cost instead is not a good incentive to get it right the first time.

Also, as one of the 10 people who still own a Blackberry, I'm not a fan of apps being required usage in a physical game.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting any changes to the game that exists. I'm curious if FFG would/should consider something like this for a future release or a hypothetical release if X-wing were to launch in say 2016 instead of 2012. As a designer, it would make "future-proofing" the game much more manageable.

Ok, I apparently misunderstood the question in the OP.

If X-Wing minis did not exist as a game up until now and were to be released for the first time in the present, would it be better to have all the pilot and upgrades have no printed points cost and just have all the points online where they can be constantly edited by FFG....

The answer is still a resounding no. Yes a lot of us use apps as reference tools when building squads, but the vast majority of new players use the cards they own as the reference to build their squads. New players are a very important and often ignored choke point for the success of a game. Every heavily invested player in any game starts off as a new player, and whether they went on to invest more in the game or dropped the game depended on their experiences as a new player. And the widespread availability of list building apps is not because of the advancement of technology, it's because of how popular the game has become over the years. A good board game should not require an internet connection to play, that's how you alienate new players, and new players are the key to the success of any game.

The other thing is that when bringing a new tabletop game to the market, your first concerns need to be that your game is fun and accessible. Competitive balance is important from the start but doesn't become as important as those things until you have built an established player base, which comes from your game being fun and accessible. Remember that the designers and developers have finite resources and time to develop the game before they have to put something out on the market so they recoup their expenses. It's not like they have years and years to tweak the balance of the game before they put it on the shelf. It's more economically feasible to release a game that is fun to play with minor balance issues and use the revenue from initial sales to go back and tweak those balance issues then it is to keep a game off the shelf, making 0 money, while you try to perfectly tweak the game's balance with just internal playtesters.

Honestly, I would be surprised if such an option was not at least considered for Armada. It simply is not feasible to perfectly balance a game from the very beginning.

And yet, the game was very balanced with Wave 1. Yes, the swarm was dominant, but it was hardly a play swarm or go home situation.

No offense, but this statement just reeks of what is currently wrong with current AAA video games. People have learned to accept a sub par product at release and wait for it to get better. Applying such a "strategy" to the fairly niche boardgame/miniature crowd is not going to work. It is lazy design. No, there won't be perfect balance. You just have to accept that as a reality, and work as hard as you can to prevent bad situations from happening. Having an option to just say, nope let's try it at this point cost instead is not a good incentive to get it right the first time.

Also, as one of the 10 people who still own a Blackberry, I'm not a fan of apps being required usage in a physical game.

Sithborg, it's not laziness, it's economics. A game designer only has so much time and so much money to spend on a game before they have to put something out on the market to generate revenue recoup their expenses. It takes a lot of work and time and internal playtesting just to make sure your game is fun to play. Asymmetric games with even a moderate level of complexity (like X-Wing) then require even more playtesting on top of that to make sure the game is balanced, and you would have to have extremely high level players playtesting your game to get a true sense of what is balanced and what isn't. Being a game designer doesn't automatically make you a high level player of the game you're designing, and it's pretty hard to find high level players of a game that isn't even public yet.

And minute balance issues, as long as their not so glaringly obvious that they completely break the game, don't actually become a problem until a large number of players start playing the game at a high enough level (min/maxing) to discover them, which means it's not a problem until after the game becomes successful and is making money.

So as long as the game designer can at least create enough balance the game is not completely broken, it makes more economic sense to release a game that is fun and enjoyable when just played casually (which is how the silent majority of purchasing gamers play), and then go back and fix any subtle balance issues that were caught by widespread high level play (which only happens if your game is fun to play) using the revenue generated by sales.

X-Wing Wave 1 and 2 had major balancing issues, but the game was fun to play, easy to learn, and was not completely broken, so it slowly gained more and more players, therefore making more and more money, in spite of the fact that the TIE Swarm had a large edge over the rest of the field and the A-Wing was pretty much competitively non-viable right out of the gate. Using the money generated from X-Wing sales, the designers not only proved that the game was a success and worth the continued support of FFG, they had more money to bring in more developers and figure out how to better deal with the TIE Swarm that was dominating the competitive scene (hint: it wasn't Assault Missiles or Flight Instructor), although ironically that lead to the creation of Fat Han and the TIE Phantom.

Necromancy!

This was when I had been playing for about four months as was starting to realize that balance was way off. Generic E-wings were trash for example.

I'm not saying I was the first or anything but it's kinda fun to take a trip down memory lane...

edit: derp

I swear the x-wing designers just go through the forum for their ideas. I'm pretty sure it was me that came up with the release strategy for Scum.