I doubt Asmodee cares if games are considered "balanced" or not. They want profitability.

17 hours ago, Darth Sanguis said:

So a thought occurs while looking at the point rebalance.

This is totally speculative and I don't think less of Alex Davy or any of the dev teams in any way , but I think Alex and the devs were fired and the studio control transferred because of the persistent imbalance in these 3 games.

Looking at this PDF, there's so much here. This was way more than I expected.


Considering that with X-Wing 2.0 the player base took a massive hit (so much so that it's essentially been dead locally since 2.0 launched); the news that Armada (a game that is only 5 and a half years old) is getting a 1.5 update requiring a similar conversion package for cards, and Legion (which is only 2 and a half years old) is getting a revision that has more than double the last rebalance changes (and honestly maybe more than Armada had over the whole 5 years), might have spooked LFL, Asmodee, or the investors into considering a plan to keep these lines profitable.

Am I crazy?

You are not crazy but what it amounts to is the game isn't selling enough models. The suits don't particularly care why exactly the game isn't selling enough models. They know the game with these guys in charge is selling fewer models. Maybe new guys in charge can find a way to sell more models for these games or come up with a new game that is cheaper to produce that sells lots of models.

4 hours ago, Ilostmycactus said:

I doubt Asmodee cares if games are considered "balanced" or not. They want profitability.

Exactly. They want the game to consistently sell lots of models. Good game, schmood game. Sell lots of models.

21 minutes ago, Frimmel said:

You are not crazy but what it amounts to is the game isn't selling enough models. The suits don't particularly care why exactly the game isn't selling enough models. They know the game with these guys in charge is selling fewer models. Maybe new guys in charge can find a way to sell more models for these games or come up with a new game that is cheaper to produce that sells lots of models.

Honestly, based on the fact that Alex was outright fired and (as far as I know) most of the rest were offered a chance to reapply and relocated it seems like they singled him out.


That's what brings all this to mind. Why was Alex singled out? All I can think is someone in the chain of command saw how much was changing in the RRG when he submitted it for approval a few weeks ago and it was the catalyst to this restructure.

Like, if you're seeing dropping sales in X-Wing 2.0 because the game needed to be remade and players hated that, and the only reason X-Wing needed remade was the balance issues were causing a decline. At the same time a Legion document is coming through that has a heap of changes in a game that's only about a quarter the lifespan of X-Wing, while also simultaneously releasing new factions that change a ton of stuff to rebalance Star Wars Armada (so much so there's a literal card pack with a fresh errata copy of all the existing cards... so many were changed).

All I'm saying is, while it likely wasn't the cause of the restructure, Alex getting singled out seems like an intentional action, not just a casualty of the restructure. If the logical thought train is:

If balance killed X-wing 1.0 and player reaction to X-wing 2.0 is killing X-Wing on whole then balance killed X-wing on whole.

You could make that same conclusion for Legion.

17 hours ago, Darth Sanguis said:

So a thought occurs while looking at the point rebalance.

This is totally speculative and I don't think less of Alex Davy or any of the dev teams in any way , but I think Alex and the devs were fired and the studio control transferred because of the persistent imbalance in these 3 games.

Looking at this PDF, there's so much here. This was way more than I expected.


Considering that with X-Wing 2.0 the player base took a massive hit (so much so that it's essentially been dead locally since 2.0 launched); the news that Armada (a game that is only 5 and a half years old) is getting a 1.5 update requiring a similar conversion package for cards, and Legion (which is only 2 and a half years old) is getting a revision that has more than double the last rebalance changes (and honestly maybe more than Armada had over the whole 5 years), might have spooked LFL, Asmodee, or the investors into considering a plan to keep these lines profitable.

Am I crazy?

GW have been designing imbalance in to their games for years to drive up sales.

Surely the suits should be selling us card packs with the updated stats/errata

30 minutes ago, Frimmel said:

You are not crazy but what it amounts to is the game isn't selling enough models.

I have serious doubts that that is the problem, though. With few exceptions, new releases sell out completely within weeks, if not days. Kind of hard to sell more models when there aren't more models to sell. So if that was the problem from the higher-ups' perspective, then they fired the completely wrong people .

7 minutes ago, Darth Sanguis said:

Honestly, based on the fact that Alex was outright fired and (as far as I know) most of the rest were offered a chance to reapply and relocated it seems like they singled him out.


That's what brings all this to mind. Why was Alex singled out? All I can think is someone in the chain of command saw how much was changing in the RRG when he submitted it for approval a few weeks ago and it was the catalyst to this restructure.

Like, if you're seeing dropping sales in X-Wing 2.0 because the game needed to be remade and players hated that, and the only reason X-Wing needed remade was the balance issues were causing a decline. At the same time a Legion document is coming through that has a heap of changes in a game that's only about a quarter the lifespan of X-Wing, while also simultaneously releasing new factions that change a ton of stuff to rebalance Star Wars Armada (so much so there's a literal card pack with a fresh errata copy of all the existing cards... so many were changed).

All I'm saying is, while it likely wasn't the cause of the restructure, Alex getting singled out seems like an intentional action, not just a casualty of the restructure. If the logical thought train is:

If balance killed X-wing 1.0 and player reaction to X-wing 2.0 is killing X-Wing on whole then balance killed X-wing.

You could make that same conclusion for Legion.

The people who make these kind of decisions don't play these games. That is all gobbledygook to them. They look at numbers. The numbers are not what they want.

2 minutes ago, Lochlan said:

I have serious doubts that that is the problem, though. With few exceptions, new releases sell out completely within weeks, if not days. Kind of hard to sell more models when there aren't more models to sell. So if that was the problem from the higher-ups' perspective, then they fired the completely wrong people .

Selling out the stock they produced is different than selling enough stock for the level of profits that produce the dividends share-holders want. The level of profits that make a company valuable enough to sell for more than was paid for it.

6 minutes ago, Frimmel said:

Selling out the stock they produced is different than selling enough stock for the level of profits that produce the dividends share-holders want. The level of profits that make a company valuable enough to sell for more than was paid for it.

Yes, but again, they can't sell more stock if they don't have more stock. If the amount of stock being sold was indeed the problem, then the actual problem was the amount of stock being manufactured. Alex Davy should have been near the bottom of the list for people to blame for that.

44 minutes ago, Lochlan said:

Yes, but again, they can't sell more stock if they don't have more stock. If the amount of stock being sold was indeed the problem, then the actual problem was the amount of stock being manufactured. Alex Davy should have been near the bottom of the list for people to blame for that.

Why don't they have more stock? Clearing the stock is not the same as clearing a whole lot more stock. How much more stock do they need? Does those extra units sold make up the difference in greater expense of getting those extra units to market? From a costs/profits standpoint if it is produce 1000 units or 1500 units but you're only going to move 1200 units you only make a 1000 units. That's the not enough models.

They might not be able to just produce the 1200 units. At 1500 maybe the margins go way up if they clear them all but if they don't clear them the extra 200 sold don't make up for not selling 300 units.

1 minute ago, Frimmel said:

Why don't they have more stock? Clearing the stock is not the same as clearing a whole lot more stock. How much more stock do they need? Does those extra units sold make up the difference in greater expense of getting those extra units to market? From a costs/profits standpoint if it is produce 1000 units or 1500 units but you're only going to move 1200 units you only make a 1000 units. That's the not enough models.

They might not be able to just produce the 1200 units. At 1500 maybe the margins go way up if they clear them all but if they don't clear them the extra 200 sold don't make up for not selling 300 units.

The point is, literally none of that has anything to do with Alex Davy or anyone else on the design team .

11 minutes ago, Lochlan said:

The point is, literally none of that has anything to do with Alex Davy or anyone else on the design team .

It does if the game used to sell 1500 units and now it sells a 1000 units.

7 minutes ago, Frimmel said:

Selling out the stock they produced is different than selling enough stock for the level of profits that produce the dividends share-holders want. The level of profits that make a company valuable enough to sell for more than was paid for it.

If they aren't happy with the number of sales, they can't determine whether or not there is enough demand to satisfy shareholders when they aren't producing/distributing enough to even remotely satisfy the demand that does exist.

1 minute ago, Frimmel said:

It does if the game used to sell 1500 units and now it sells a 1000 units.

Stock issues have always been bad with this game. The only way stock issues could be persistently bad despite waning sales would be if the production team could literally see the future.

Maybe it several compounding factors.

I could see, ffg being a Boardgame studio involving alot of paper product was decided to be less cost effective at producing the plastic side of legion. Amg already focusing on a plastic miniatures on sprue was considered to be more cost effective.

Was the move to make models on sprue the first domino to bring the move?

The rumors of what happened with Alex are going to keep going and be unclear until we hear from ffg or Alex about what really happened.

1 hour ago, Lochlan said:

The point is, literally none of that has anything to do with Alex Davy or anyone else on the design team .

Which is why the fact that Alex was singled out sticks out during all this. Why fire him with no opportunity to reapply while giving the others an option to reapply if they (being someone at Asmodee, LFL, or the investment firm) weren't unsatisfied with his work?

This sounds to me like the company was in the motions to do the move already, but somewhere along the lines they decided that Alex's further involvement with the projects would be more detrimental, more so than even the rest of the team.


The company leadership had to have feedback, no matter how generic, as to why certain parts of the product line were under performing and what the causes were? (looking at 2.0) There had to have been a discussion about 2.0 and why it had to happen long before they did it, and there had to be talks of why it was worth the cost investment. I'm sure the head of the dev departments were involved in the whole process too, explaining what was going on to the guys who just dealt with the money. (My company has meetings all the time with the heads of departments to track direction and cost analysis, I'm sure something has big as Asmodee and FFG do the same). It's not a far stretch then to consider the leadership at least partially informed about the quality of life of their product.

If they were told X is the reason this product was failing and required further investment, then found out later the investment was failing to deliver expected returns, then seeing X reappear in another product line would definitely spur action.

Points rebalances may be a normal thing in TTGs, but the rate at which changes are happening in Legion doubles or triples that of X-Wing and Armada. If I was part of the controlling interest that decided whether to approve investments in a product line and saw the thing that I was told ruined another product (which even after reinvesting has been on a downturn) running rampant, I'd want swift action taken.

I don't know how well it applies but I know I from a subcontractor's point of view, if our product fails we have to explain to the people who hired us why it failed, and to the customer about what we can do to fix it. It can quickly damage a working relationship if it happens multiple times. I've seen people fired for this exact thing. Sometimes even just as a preventive measure to maintain a customer relationship.


I don't think it's beyond the scope of reason.


If it's not the case the burning question still comes back to why was Alex singled out?

My guess is that they wanted to give creative control to AMG and that was not going to work with Alex in the picture. It’s not a knock on him, but rather a business decision that they would rather not have the prospect of the creator of the game potentially causing rifts due to not being able to call the shots.

2 minutes ago, Mokoshkana said:

My guess is that they wanted to give creative control to AMG and that was not going to work with Alex in the picture. It’s not a knock on him, but rather a business decision that they would rather not have the prospect of the creator of the game potentially causing rifts due to not being able to call the shots.

So my next thought is, if this is true, why was Gernes given the opportunity to reapply then? Wouldn't he pose a similar threat?

18 minutes ago, Darth Sanguis said:

So my next thought is, if this is true, why was Gernes given the opportunity to reapply then? Wouldn't he pose a similar threat?

Perhaps, but I can honestly say Davy made more public interviews more recently about the direction the game was going and in all likelihood, after it was known at FFG that the game was going to AMG. Maybe his vocalizations of his vision of the direction of the game (however vague) didn't sit well and or perhaps he hadn't full cleared the content of the interview with senior leadership and they took exception to it.

8 minutes ago, Bigbboyd said:

Perhaps, but I can honestly say Davy made more public interviews more recently about the direction the game was going and in all likelihood, after it was known at FFG that the game was going to AMG. Maybe his vocalizations of his vision of the direction of the game (however vague) didn't sit well and or perhaps he hadn't full cleared the content of the interview with senior leadership and they took exception to it.

I suppose it could be, though Gernes just did an interview about Armada 1.5 very recently too.

23 minutes ago, Darth Sanguis said:

Which is why the fact that Alex was singled out sticks out during all this. Why fire him with no opportunity to reapply while giving the others an option to reapply if they (being someone at Asmodee, LFL, or the investment firm) weren't unsatisfied with his work?

I do agree that it is very unusual that Alex appears to be one of the only major team members to not even be given the opportunity to reapply.

23 minutes ago, Darth Sanguis said:

Points rebalances may be a normal thing in TTGs, but the rate at which changes are happening in Legion doubles or triples that of X-Wing and Armada. If I was part of the controlling interest that decided whether to approve investments in a product line and saw the thing that I was told ruined another product (which even after reinvesting has been on a downturn) running rampant, I'd want swift action taken.

...but I really don't think this is the reason. Even with the rampant balance issues in X-Wing 1.0, I don't think balance hurt the sales of the game at all. However, I do think it is possible that interest from a lot of the player base was waning as a result of those balance issues, and 2.0 requiring them to spend a significant amount of money to keep playing may have been the excuse they needed to drop out. But Armada (which Alex was involved in early on) has been incredibly well balanced for the most part, and Legion has never had a critical, systemic balance problem—just some pretty big outliers. The only reason I have ever seen anyone give for dropping out of Legion was the inability to get the models they wanted due to supply issues. Also X-Wing literally does points changes at least twice a year. 1/year `is not two to three times 2/year.

21 minutes ago, Mokoshkana said:

My guess is that they wanted to give creative control to AMG and that was not going to work with Alex in the picture. It’s not a knock on him, but rather a business decision that they would rather not have the prospect of the creator of the game potentially causing rifts due to not being able to call the shots.

This is also a possibility, but it doesn't make much sense to me. Certainly AMG will need more staff to handle the workload of now working on 300% more games, some of which have much bigger player bases than MCP. And why give Luke Eddy and Michael Gernes (and who knows who else) the opportunity to move over but not Alex? The only explanation I can come up with is that, as Alex is probably the most senior design staff member (he worked on X-Wing, Armada, and Legion), he was probably the highest paid. And since everything Asmodee has done in the past couple years has been to maximize profits, it probably made financial sense to them to cut one of the bigger salaries.

16 minutes ago, Lochlan said:

...but I really don't think this is the reason. Even with the rampant balance issues in X-Wing 1.0, I don't think balance hurt the sales of the game at all. However, I do think it is possible that interest from a lot of the player base was waning as a result of those balance issues, and 2.0 requiring them to spend a significant amount of money to keep playing may have been the excuse they needed to drop out. But Armada (which Alex was involved in early on) has been incredibly well balanced for the most part, and Legion has never had a critical, systemic balance problem—just some pretty big outliers. The only reason I have ever seen anyone give for dropping out of Legion was the inability to get the models they wanted due to supply issues. Also X-Wing literally does points changes at least twice a year. 1/year `is not two to three times 2/year.

You could be right. It is all speculation after all. To be fair, I haven't been following X-Wing 2.0 like I did 1.0, so I don't know what the changes look like in that. What I do know is that 2.0 was designed to be persistently updated to maintain balance. (Which is part of the reason I think they corporate structure has an idea of what's going on. At some point the dev teams had to pitch the app after all. There had to be a big "Why spend this money?" moment.)

Armada has been insanely balanced, I don't think Armada has had this many changes over the course of the entire game, which is why I'm surprised.

I don't even think if the decision is related to balance like I suspect it is that it would be about dropping numbers (yet) but rather about being proactive for their now leading product line. Legion, like Armada and X-wing 1.0 was not designed to have persistent updates (as seen by design features of cards with printed numbers and a lack of medium to disperse changes and maintain consistency (the App).

I think after the results of 2.0 Asmodee and the invested parties don't want to risk another second edition for some time.


Who knows, ultimately the timing seems suspicious to me.

Lots of speculation going around here. Do we even know that Alex Davey was not given the opportunity to reapply? His FB post doesn't say. Maybe he didn't want to reapply given the circumstances and move to a different state, which would be totally understandable.

It's not always some malign corporate conspiracy to silence a designer for whatever contrived reason people come up with. Having talked with people that have to deal with Asmodee, its mostly just sheer incompetence that leads to bad decisions such as these.

This turnover seems to have come as a surprise for a lot of people including FFG and AMG staff themselves. Asmodee has been splitting up FFG for a long time now (see roleplay systems and sleeves). The miniature department was just the next step and there will be no reason like sells or balance beyond that. Of course, this doesn't excuse how badly Asmodee handled the transition so far.

18 minutes ago, Darth Sanguis said:

What I do know is that 2.0 was designed to be persistently updated to maintain balance. (Which is part of the reason I think they corporate structure has an idea of what's going on. At some point the dev teams had to pitch the app after all. There had to be a big "Why spend this money?" moment.)

That is very possible. I would hope, however, that someone would have explained to them that a lot of online video games intentionally use constant balance changes as a way to make money hand over fist, and that the same thing could be applied to X-Wing as well.

For all we know there was some kind of personality conflict. Maybe Davey was hard to work with. Maybe he was viewed as a scapegoat for not meeting metrics. We don't know.

Honestly, I don't know who was the final authority on this game; but, there is a lot of imbalance in Legion that should never have gotten through in the first place.

Maybe its because I've played minis games for a long time, or am an amateur games designer, but some things I noticed straight off the bat were:

• Heavies were extremely over-costed, mostly because some objectives couldn't be taken by them and they couldn't dish out quite enough to make back their points.
• Heavy weapons were too expensive on squads, making it easier for people to min max their activations by taking minimum squad sizes.
• Strike teams were a silly choice due to their efficiency (but I can see a case for them being there).
• Refresh weapons, and refresh abilities, were too inefficient, because units like to get every action they can get. Most players saw that only refresh things that auto-refreshed some how, were good.
• Action economy was king, so units that were able to benefit from this would do very well.
• Units with high speed were really good only if they were also melee units, or could take objectives.
• Vehicles and creatures were gimped from half the objectives. Why? A tank crew can get out of a vehicle and activate something. It just really makes people wary of going with lots of these units. Players should not feel hindered in list building like this.
• Lots of the characters were way too expensive for what they did.
• Bounty was unreliable, and secret mission was way stronger than it.
• Line of sight and cover felt weird. You should have to measure range and LOS from each model in a unit, not just range from the leader. Cover to the center of the model is often too hard to get. It makes people set up their models in these weird formations to chain cover on simply immersion breaking angles. Also, seeing the unit leaders of units stand way out from cover is also immersion breaking.
• Rules felt too clustered/disorganized/spread out, in the RRG. I would have preferred something more concise.
• All models should have been treated as volumes, rather than looking model to model. It saves so many arguments.
• Forests and other types of area terrain should be unified into a single consistent type, that provides both cover and difficult ground. Having some types of area that do not just automatically do both can be confusing to the tournament player, making it hard to prepare for that type of terrain, and practice for it.

There's probably other things, and I could go into more depth. But most of the above my friends and I figured out after only a few games of each relevant rule upon its release.

I liked Alex as a designer, sad to see him go. I still had the above critiques though.