Bad arguments for the 6th ed. "leak"

Time for more logical fallacies.  This one pertaining to the 6th ed. rules "leak".

The primary argument I've heard for the leaked rule book being real follows:

A real 40K rule book takea a lot of effort to write.
This leaked rule book took a lot of effort to write.
Therefor This leaked rule book is a real rule book.

Or abstractly:


All A is a B
C is a B
Therefore C is an A


To make it clear, lets Venn it out

Just because something takes effort does not mean that it is real, only that it could be.  Yet, this is a common argument in support of it,

Another fallacy I see in relation to the leak is wishful thinking.  Since the leak matches what people want the next edition to be like, they are more inclined to believe it.  

Then there's this gem from a guy by the name of Stucarius:

“The work that has gone into this set of rules is legion. There are not that many designers in this community who could do it and I cannot imagine anyone who would and then not take credit.” 

To be honest there is absolutely no evidence I have seen so far that points to this not being a leaked copy or a near final draft of the rules. Very much the opposite actually. All the circumstantial and logical evidence, not to mention history (see the leak of 5th ed) point to this being the rules.

Since there is no evidence that is is not true, it must be true.  That does not logically follow.  This is what is known as an argument from ignorance(not trying to be mean, that's really the name of the fallacy).  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

There's also a false dilemma.  It presents the choice that its real or its being done by someone who would intentionally not take credit for it.  This is denying the possibility of other reasonable assumptions, like the author is unavailable to take credit or doesn't want to be sued by GW.  The whole argument right now is being presented as a false dilemma.  Either it's real or a hoax.  It's denying the very real possibility that it is someones pet project; not something done to intentionally deceive.

There's some correlation is not causation action going on too.  Just because the 5th edition leak turned out to be real, does not mean that the 6th edition leak will turn out to be real.

The leak could very well be true.  Tearing apart the arguments, does not change the truth of the matter.  But if the arguments for the potion are bad, and the evidence for the position is bad, it is most likely that the position should not be affirmed.  The evidence against the hoax is just about as bad as the evidence for.  To me that's a push.  I'll wait and see what happens.

I do think it's interesting that with equaly poor evidence for and against most people seam to believe the leak is real.  I think that's because most people want to believe what they are reading is really 6th edition.  Unfortunately wanting something cannot change reality.

Cognitive Dissonance, Dunning and Kruger, and probably some other things

Time for another psudo-apologist post about GW with a sprinkling of cognitive bias.  I'm fascinated by biases and trying to understand the reasons why we believe things.  Have you ever noticed how no mater what the topic is people tend to act in the same way when their opinions and beliefs are challenged?  Whether you have a Mac and a Windows guy, a Privateer and a GW guy, or a Democrat and a Republican, its always the same tired back and forth arguments.  It goes way beyond just the standard sloppy logical fallacies.  You can be dead right and still make a logical fallacy in your argument.  I'm talking about the way people think they are dead right when in reality they are dead wrong.

It's not rational behavior in any sense.  There are psychology studies that show that when you give people good evidence contradictory to their beliefs it only makes their original beliefs stronger.   A current theory behind this is that the person experiences cognitive dissonance.  The two competing ideas bounce around inside the person's head causing stress, so the person has to alter their perceptions to alleviate the source of that stress.  We also tend to value our own experiences over those of others, so we will often rationalize away any contradictory evidence instead of altering our understanding of our own feelings on a subject.  Other times people will just ignore the contradictions completely and not realize they exists ("Keep government away from my medicare", anyone?).  

Psychology is a soft science.  It's hard to do the controlled studies it takes to really examine cause and effect relationships in peoples' behavior without raising batches of clones in bubbles.  There are many compelling experiments that do describe the behavior I'm talking about as best as can be done.  You can read about the studies themselves by jumping off the reference links in the articles already mentioned.

"So how does this all relate to apologizing for GW?", you may ask.  Well, I think people have a few contradictory ideas about games workshop bouncing around in their head.  Often I see people concurrently assign super-competence and incompetence to GW simultaneously.   For instance take this comment that appeared recently on TheBack40K:

You'll never SEE a good competative game of 40K 'by the book'...because there is little profit in it. For example: Why make halberds +2 to Init and not +1? Because this makes Init 5 furious charge types too competative and along with things like GK termies getting frag grenades to one-up other termies...not harping on GK, just looking at how every codex does not MARGINALLY overshadow msot of the previous armie's books....if there's not much edge to playing and buying all those new models, who's going to lay out the cash?

The same goes with a unit's effectivness on the battlefield being some indication to GW pricing....for example, the Ogre Magi figure from Reaper looks better than the Obliterator from GW...yet you can buy two for the price one oblit. Why are wraithguard $15 a pieece, when their metal content is no better than a assault marine? 

GW KNOWS people love 40k Tourneys yet refuse to say 40k is a competative game. Why in Krist's name does it take years to get codex out? I believe they think a smaller consistant company with a captured audience is better than one that targets more folks with faster turn around on their game books. There's no reason new updated codex shouldn't come out every 3 years, period, and updated minor rules yearly. If they did a large Codex official rules update book for 4+ armies every year, a lot of the gamer tested balance issues would be fixed.

So GW is devious enough to know that they can leverage codex creep and unit effectiveness to dollar cost to maximize profit, but is not smart enough to release product in a reasonable amount of time.   Well of course not, they are too busy being capital 'E' evil.  The characterization may be a bit of a stretch here, but I think it's a common sentiment.  People tend to insist that GW is incapable of releasing a balanced game, but still can find creative ways of ripping you off.  You could argue that the marketing is smarter than the design team, but
a smart management would know that it's much easier to sell a good product than a bad one.

Sometimes I think that GW could do things better, but I also know that I am none of the following things:

• A miniature sculptor
• A miniature manufacturer
• A professional game designer
• A CEO of a company with an international sales and distribution network.
• Responsible for the jobs of hundreds of people
• Responsible to hundreds of shareholders

There is another neat little cognitive bias known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.  Basically, you have a hard time understanding fields that you have limited knowledge off.  So much so, in fact, that you tend to overestimate your skills in areas you are not proficient in.  In other words, you don't know how dumb you are.

We as amateurs and the uninitiated can look at the actions of GW and declare what they should obviously do.  Of course, we are only speaking from our own ignorance of the situation.  That doesn't mean I or anyone else couldn't provide good ideas to GW if asked.  It also doesn't mean that GW is infallible.  It does mean that, from our arm chairs, most of us don't have the skills and knowledge to make the right call.

Basically we all arguing about our feelings.  Projecting imaginary motives on others' actions and making false dichotomies.  It doesn't really accomplish anything.  I don't think it's possible to convince someone of anything by arguing.  Our self image and group status are much more important to us than facts we can't understand. I'm guilty of that as much as anyone else is.  I've often blamed game balance and dice instead of accurately measuring my own skill to protect my ego. The best thing that could possibly happen is you can try to get someone to look at the rationalizations behind their opinions.  Hopefully people will work things out on their own.

Mitigating chance versus failure

I was involved in a debate over redundancy last week, and after taking a few days to think about it relized something.  The current debate is about if redundancy is needed to make a good list.  Redundancy seems like a good idea so where is the debate coming from?  In my opinion it is coming from different competing list optimizations strategies.  People are using the strategy that works for them, and not seeing the benefits of the others.  I think that the two main strategies are Mitigation of Failure(redundancy) and Mitigation of Chance(reliability)

First I'll talk about redundancy. It's a specific measure of how well the list mitigates the results of failure.  I consider a unit to fail when it doesn't live up to it's expected potential.  So if a unit is either destroyed before performing its intended role, or isn't effective when it does perform its role, it fails.  Redundancy is a good way around this.  You take multiple reliable and expendable options to fulfill a role.  This way you have backup in the case of a failure.  

When optimizing to redundancy you build units on a budget.  You don't waste points on upgrades you don't need.  You build highly specialized units, though units that can fulfill a secondary role on the cheap are highly prized. 

The opposing measure of list optimization that is fueling the current debate is reliability.  When you optimize to reliability you try to make units more potent, so that when they fulfill their roll, they do it much better than required on average.  You're try to reinforce a unit so that it is less likely to survive to fulfill its role and to effectively perform that role when needed.

If you are optimizing for reliability, you end up paying a few extra points to up squad sizes or purchase upgrades that are effective but useful only 10% of the time.  Generalist utility units are very important. 

Both methods of optimization have pit-falls associated with them. Go for too much redundancy and you've pulled the teeth out of your army.  Everything is so expendable that it has no tactical value or offensive punch. MSU vanilla  marines can really fall into this trap.  5 man squads in Razorbacks are potent in mass, but can't do much on their own.  Same goes for many other MSU favorites.  

Optimize for reliability too much and you put all your eggs in one basket.  You can mitigate chance, but you can't control it completely.  As many points as you put into making a unit reliable, you can still suffer the effects of a few bad rolls and loose a much larger investment in points.  Fateweaver is my favorite example of this.  He makes the demon army very reliable, but a few bad rolls and the demon player's army is crippled.  

It's a give and take situation with reliability and redundancy.  Make a unit too reliable and there aren't enough points left over to take a redundant back up.  Build in too much redundancy and you don't have any clutch unit to fight the army out of a tough spot.  I think wolves are such a good army because they can balance redundancy and reliability at the same time.   They can add a wolf guard and special weapon to small units to make them reliable.  And they have reliable units like thunder wolves that are not too expensive to preclude redundancy.  Compare that with vanilla marines.  TH/SS terminators are very reliable, but are so expensive when you factor in their transport requirement that you have to build a list around them.  5 man tactical squads in razors make a good redundant core, but you can't improve their reliability until you go to 10 man squads.   

The best armies and units are the ones that can best balance reliability and redundancy.  I think that a lot of armies are not getting the fair evaluation they should because players are applying the wrong optimization approach when building their lists.  People are going too far down the MSU route for Dark Eldar and can't build the reliable Tyranid Nidzilla they used too.   I think the xenos books need the right balance to work properly more than the imperial armies. Any of the marines can work if you get the balance wrong because they can fall back on their good stat line.  Guard can work out of balance because you can gain reliability though sheer weight of firepower. 

Warhammeronomics

I watched the documentary film version of Freakonomics on Neflix the other night, and it was very fascinating.  Although there was no segment analyzing the behavior of miniature war gamers, there was an interesting segment talking about incentives and cheating.  The economist was talking about how people will find a way to break any incentive system put in place to try and control behavior.  A typical 40k tournament is essentially an incentive system to control player behavior.  Painting scores are there to try and make us paint our armies.  Sportsmanship is there to control the way we interact.  Comp makes us obey the fluff.  It's no surprise that there is a way to abuse all of theses systems.

If people are going to break your carefully crafted incentive systems, then why bother?   Tournaments, for the most part, are fun to play in.  You get to play the game in a manner different from the normal causal weekend games at the local game store.  The trick is to not put too much additional complexity into the design.  Every tournament pack that has ever made me ask what the TO was drinking when he wrote it has tried to use too much complexity to solve the problem of bad player behavior.  A complex rule system for a tournament isn't necessarily going to stop people from abusing the spirit of the game anymore than a simple one.

As a software developer I know a few things about complex systems.  The more elements you add causes the amount of interactions between those elements to grow exponentially.  All those interactions are places when unexpected behavior can occur.   They represent places where people can break the rules and get away with it.   

It's been my observation that people will bend the rules just enough to get what they want. Cheating is essentially a lazy act, so you won't see people create complex ways to cheat simple systems. It's too much work.  With a simple system, the ways to break it are obvious, so it becomes obvious to see when someone does it.

You also don't need complex systems for people to have fun.  The escalation league I'm running is a good example of this.  The league essentially has two rules sets.  The first one can be explained in a few sentences.  You play games, get points for winning, and then spend those points to gain rank.  It's really not that much more complicated than that.  The second is an optional campaign with special rules and missions.  I almost always see people playing in the simple free form manner of the first rules set, than with the more complex campaign rules.

Another bit of wisdom carried over form software development is the distinction between a working solution and an elegant one.  Most of what we can  hope for is a good enough working solution.  A tournament system that get's it right most of the time is good enough.  And you don't need complexity for a most of the time solution.  And if you keep refining the good enough solution, over time it may become an elegant one that works all the time..

So the moral of the story: Cheaters are going to cheat, so keep it simple and have fun despite them.