>>95999412
>old, outdated basic units aren't updated, instead each army gets an unnecessary (and often ugly) new monster/monstrous cavalry/chariot
>ruleset almost requires hordes of those old ugly basic infantry units, and makes elite infantry or cavalry and monsters unfavourable and almost extinct after making cannons way too accurate
>in an attempt to "balance" things, wizards are given spells that can delete huge amounts of models, making big powerful wizards also near obligatory, and the games rely on them too much
>we see the first units getting sold with a price of over 4€ per infantry model, and we see the massive replacement of metal as a material with "fine"cast, which is catastrophically flawed and also even more overpriced
>rulescreep that's visible even between what should be similar armies (tomb kings, vampire counts) which generally brought the already underdog armies to sell even less
>rules were generally additional stuff added to the previous editions, making the rules appear bloated and intimidating to a newcomer, reducing new blood massively, once compounded with the entry cost due to the infantry meta and the mounting sweaty competitive mentality

TOW did well by selling units in larger bundles, giving a relatively better price per model ratio
TOW did well also by expanding the points allowance for lords so that big heroes on monsters could be viable* (they were virtually absent in 8th), and these points sinks prevent armies from having to be made effectively of hundreds of dollars of (old and outdated) basic troops
On this line, TOW also did well by proposing armies of infamy where you can build armies around nicher more elite concepts, which may or may not what attracts someone to that faction in the first place, as well as giving somewhat widespread options to include some elite and cavalry units in the core requirements of way more factions
TOW did well by making magic relatively weaker, even more so now after the errata