Wow, missed this essay when first posted. Pretty good read. I'm going to pull out a few things and correct what I believe to be inaccuracies just for additional posterity.
Overall, it still gives a pretty good idea.
R5Don4 wrote:
The assignment of the final cost score was not done by Rob. He had former Magic R&D/Magic Pro-Tour do all the costing.
Rob had the final say on all costs. Mons however did the preliminary costing of all figs and most of it stuck.
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To say no formula was used is misleading.
I would argue the exact opposite, but perhaps that's semantics on how one defines a formula. I think most people will thing that element A adds X to the cost and element B adds Y and every element has an associated cost. You add them up and get the basic cost. WotC did not have a formula in that respect. No where was there a secret chart with 20 Damage vs 10 Damage or anything else. It's all comparison based to other figures, which is formulaic in some respect, but not what I think most people would consider a formula.
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The costing was based officially on two factors (well actually three if you include attempts to compensate for errors). A simple formula that can be reverse engineered by anyone with some time and a sliding scale based on a units rating Rob would to assign it.
As noted, no such animal. Confirmed by Rob multiple times.
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Every unit in every set was assigned a rating from 1 to 10. If a unit was given a 1 it was destined to be a univerally recognized bad piece that would offer less than others of the exact same cost. Early examples of 1's include the Ithorian Scout and Klatoonian Enforcer. If a unit was given a 10, this was going to be a great piece.
I believe this is a complete misinterpretation of some of Rob's comments. As I understand it, there was a power-scale used but it was earlier in the process and completely unrelated to cost or cost/value ratio. I believe he used it when discussing with LFL and/or Bill Slavicek to determine how powerful they wanted a particular character to be. So Ewoks are 1 and Vader SL was originally a 10. And maybe when they designed Vader JH he asked the question and they answered the question "he's the meanest of the mean--pump this Vader up to 11!". And that ended up being 75 points. But it's important to understand that IG-86s are fantastic for their cost, but they're still power 3 or so, not 10. Power is not related to cost. Similarly Reven was again a case of "Make this guy an 11!" even though he's not worth 88 points. Rob talked about this in relation to characters who he didn't know all that well--it let him get a grip on whether he was shooting for a mid-costed 30ish point character or a 60 point plus monster.
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Boris the Dwarf/Grand Moff Boris/Boris/aka Dennis Beard famously (at least for us old time SWM nerds) asked Rob about this in person at Gencon in regard to the differences in the Stormtrooper
and the Rebel Trooper
, both five points but clearly not the same. Rob confirmed the Stormtrooper by straight formula should have been 6 points but because they wanted them to be more playable they made them only cost 5.
Here's the actual quote:
chat wrote:
boris_the_dwarf: Could you explain how you came up with the point system, specifically for basic troopers? The basic Rebels seem much weaker than their Imperial counterparts for the same cost.
wotc_robwatkins: I started off by organizing all of the miniatures in Rebel Storm by relative power level. Then I rescaled the point values such that they miniatures fit into a 100-point format. The basic Rebel troopers are not as good as the Stormtroopers, pound for pound, for their point cost. This was by design. The Stormtroopers are worth more like 5.8 to 6 points, but we priced them at 5 so that we would see lots of Stormtroopers in play on the table. The Rebel uniques are also priced aggressively because we wanted to see Han and Chewie and friends running around the game.
It's subtle but Rob never said anything about a formula in that interview. In comparison to a Rebel Trooper the Stormie should have been 6 because he's obviously statistically better. But this was indeed the fount where all myths about a secret formula sprang.
But very few have gone back and looked at what was actually said...
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The cursory playtesting that was done was only within the current set or sets being designed at the time-see Soresu Mastery, rather than the game as a whole.
I don't think this is true at all. Older pieces were clearly considered and included in playtesting. (That alone however doesn't mean that there aren't a ton of questionable pricing decisions in this regard. It's just too simplistic and inaccurate an answer.)
Thanks for writing it all out in one place. The clarifications above wouldn't be possible without all the time you put into the original post.