Quote Originally Posted by Cheesegear View Post
But, to answer your statement, no, you don't need power creep to constantly change your meta. But arbitrary bannings and restrictions are classic in their ability to not solve any problems. The only thing that arbitrary handicaps does, is force a new, different meta. But, I guess if your goal is to change the meta, not fix it, then, job's a good'un, I guess.
1) You don't need to ban things, either, and frankly I'd never even considered that as a possibility >.> I was specifically addressing where you asserted:

Anyone who says otherwise wants the game to be stale and lame and I hate them.
No power creep means a Warmahordes meta where nothing changes. Ever.
So yes, I AM just talking about changing the meta because that's the point I'm responding to: that power creep is the only way to create a changing meta

2) You can't "fix" GW's meta, there's too many moving parts, but that's not necessary to make a changing meta.

To have a changing meta, you can either introduce new elements to the game (see what happens whenever new Heroes are introduced in Dota 2) or have deliberate counters to each army in each other's lists. The former isn't necessary for the most part (though it's still being done, last i checked) and the latter creates a scenario where every army is in constant flux. A player finds out that strategy A is winning 3 times out of 4, let's say. That means that a bunch of people will take strategy A to multiple battles. Then another player finds out that strategy B works well at countering strategy A, and since the meta has a lot of strategy A now, a bunch of people take strategy B lists. Then strategy C comes along and so on.

Yes, this is difficult to do when your meta is composed of multiple different armies with their own strengths and weaknesses, I get that, but each army has more than enough unit types and strategies to pull off a multi-strategy approach already. At most, this might require minor retooling. Tau can take skyfire to counter flyers, like you said, because Necrons at the time could basically spam their flyers. Which means Necrons would take fewer flyer lists and, say, bring more monoliths or deadeyes. Skyfire would become ineffective, so skyfire would fade away.

There's about a billion ways to have your meta be changing, fun and/or evolving. Power creep works but it's not the only way to make a proper meta, and frankly it's an unhealthy way to run your meta. Sure, you CAN live on nothing but cups of water and loafs of bread, that doesn't mean you're going to the Olympics.

That said I don't think codex creep is real, at least not as it keeps being defined at me, so make of that what you will.