actually, GW shouldn't have brought them back. Points are a lame and bad design method and never give you balance. They only let to that ETC nightmare in WHFB.
They dont give you balance, what they give you is a structure to play a game with, particularly pickup games. If you're just playing out a group storytelling session with your buddies in the basement using toy soldiers as a visual aid, then you don't need official points, and someone telling you what or how many models you can run in your army just gsts in the way. However, the same can be said for official unit profiles, core rules, scenarios, settings, factions, characters, and restricted model ranges.
Basement campaigns don't need any of that. Any bit of it they like they can borrow, but any bit they dont they can jettison. As far as that calvinball type of gaming is concerned,
AoS is a model range, one of many, not a game, so it doesn't matter whether or not that game has points values.
But if you want to engage with age of sigmar AS a game, a game like risk or monopoly or parcheesy or yugioh, where each gameplay session is its own playfully competitive experience, a fame you can play with a stranger and use as an ice breaking activity
tk make new friends rather than an activity that requires you to already be friends, then some sort of strucfute is needed. It doesn't have to be points.
In magic the gathering, its a minimum number of cards, maximum of each given card, and mana costs. That system isn't 'perfectly balanced' either, in that you can't grab cards at random, or purely for narrative reasons, and expect a deck that plays well as one that is deliberately constructed. Likewise, while there are a number of different faction-like themes you can base a deck on (colors, tribes, guilds, etc), those themes aren't perfectly balanced against each other, either. You can build a samurai deck, but such a deck isn't going to beat a competitive tournament deck built to win rather than evoke a theme. Even at the level of mana costs of individual cards the game isnt perfectly balanced.
From this perpective, MtG's balance is not only less than perfect, it's also no more balanced than any GW points system has ever been. BUT balance is only a secondary goal. Balance as good as possible while allowing the meta to shift and evolve so the game doesn't grow stale is desired and shoyld be aimed for even if attaining perfect balance is impossible, but the system is really there for structure. To enable games.
One area magic has a big leg up in is having diffetent formats. Sealed, draft, commander, standard, block, vintage, etc, with different restrictions leading to different play experiences. GW games are only just experimenting with this, but instead of different formats with different structures, we have matched play with some structure, and narrativa and open play with none at all. Skirmish and path to glory are much better examples of alternate formats, and i hope they continue to see refinement going forward.
Magic also had a more clearly defined gap between casual 'friday night magic' and tournament games, with local stores typically regularly running both. And games are shorter, so if your casual goblin deck gets smacked down by some hard core tournament deck, the game doesnt last long enough to get frustrating, you both have a laigh, and move on to other games against other players. GW games tend to last so long that a bad matchup can ruin your entire afternoon of gaming.
Magic also encourages collecting multiple decks, so the same player might be carrying casual and tournament decks, and can pull out whichever is appropriate for a given opponent.
Each warhammer army costs hundreds of dollars and work hours to collect, assemble, and paint, so that's not especially viable. Shardspire tries to be an alternative here, but that games a bit wonky, and the figures dont transition super well into regular armies. Skirmish is a better alternative here, and i almost wish gw would roll the skirmish rules into the free core rules and just make a revised version of skirmish the primary default 'way to play'.
Im rambling now, but in general my experience is that points, or something like them, are needed for
AoS to work as a game, especially a pick up game. They do get in the way of basement battle campaigns, but those can just ditch points, along with any other game element that doesnt fit the players' vision.
