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cody.d. wrote:
Or perhaps religion would be a better comparison? Everyone believes something different and is certain that those beliefs are absolute. And will attempt to beat down anyone who has a different view, regardless of how sturdy their own platform may be.

So, casuals would be the ones who just go to church on Sunday, sing a few songs, and hang out with friends, while competitive players would be the ones who start crusades and inquisitions? You know, that actually works...

Honestly as long as peeps have a bit of fun and enjoyment does it all really matter?

Individuals and small groups don't amount to much, but collectively, they can exert great control over the game and its community. Warmachine is an example of a game that went completely competitive, and while people were defending it (even praising it) early on for such a decision, it has become very obvious that it was this mindset which ultimately destroyed the game. I believe that a competitive mindset, if allowed to fester, will absolutely destroy any game it takes hold of.

I think what people tend to forget is that competitive players all start out as casuals at some point (if not of the current game, than of a different game that introduced them to the hobby). They don't start out thinking "My goal is to win tournaments". They start out thinking, "This looks like a fun game. I'll give it a try." If you don't have new players and casuals, your game is basically one of those towns in Japan, where the low birth rate and number of people leaving for opportunities has created a ghost town that is slowly disappearing.

Similarly, I've seen a lot of casual, older players that say they were competitive in the past, but now just want to chuck some dice around and have fun with mates. It seems like the competitive mindset is temporary, possibly even unsustainable over time. If your game is too competitive orientated, with no room for casuals, these players leave the game when they stop being competitive (like Warmachine). Games which support a healthy casual community (like AoS) end up keeping these players.

I think of being competitive as the "teenage years" of being a gamer. It's just a phase. You are full of yourself, you think your problems are everybody's problems, and you believe you know more than you actually do - but don't worry. It doesn't last forever. Eventually, you grow up.

Nurglitch wrote:
I've proposed using lists fixed by the organizers to make the game about skills on the table.

Not going to happen. That would reveal the actual skill of the players, rather than how well they can download netlists and follow flow charts, and the blow to their fragile egos would be too great...

...but I'd really like to see something like that. They've had sealed deck tournaments for CCGs forever, but they've never really had premade deck tournaments - probably because you can still avoid responsibility for the loss by blaming the randomness of the decks.

 Horst wrote:

And you guys say tournament players are toxic, lol. Talking down about people who don't play the game in the same way as you is REALLY different from the tournament players who talk down to casuals....

I don't care how they play (though I won't ever agree with it). But I don't like what competitive players do to the games. I don't generally use the word "toxic", but there's no getting around the fact that when competitive players become the dominant play style of a game, it is poisonous to the long term health of the game.

I can't tell you the number of people I've heard say that they quit playing games because of this attitude. Tom Vassel has a notorious example of one player - just one person - ruining Netrunner for him and Sam Healey within a few minutes, despite greatly enjoying the game and playing it. If one player can delete two players, is that healthy for the game? Is a single competitive player worth two casual players? And a single overly competitive player can ruin the game for more than just two people over his many years - I can't tell you how many Warmachine players I never saw a second time. I doubt I could ever have such a immediate and damaging affect on the game, regardless of what I did.

Honestly, look at the winning lists for recent tournaments. There is quite a bit of variation. Even if a list has a similar "core", almost every player puts a different spin on their list over someone else's. It's incredibly rare for 2 players to play the same "netlist".

If everybody is driving the same sports car, does it matter if they are painted slightly different shades of red?

phillv85 wrote:I think the issue here may actually be Facebook. A lot of people seem to turn in to trumped up ass holes as soon as they log into social media. The amount of abuse posted on those platforms is astonishing, makes Dakka look like everyone here are BFF’s.

I think the general level of cruelty on display is something unique to social media, but I've seen the competitive mindset drive players from games - even when the competitive players were otherwise amiable people. They can be great guys, but then curb stomp a newbie while overloading them with tons of information about what they did wrong, what they need to buy next, how to play better, and so on.

There’s always some judgemental ass hole gate keeping

Gatekeeping gets a bad rap. In video games, if we were a bit more deliberate in who's opinions we listened to, people like Anita Sarkeesian wouldn't have ruined a generation of games.

Alphabet wrote:I find the game is rarely about "skill" which is why it has brought me so many laughs over the years, chance does that.

Seems like this would be a very easy thing to test (play two armies multiple times, then switch an play the opponent's armies multiple times - in a game of skill, the better player would have more wins, rather than the better army). However, because of the significant amount of randomness inherent in something like 40k, you'd have to play a significant number of games to reach a conclusion (law of really big numbers says that the more data points you have, the closer the data will approach a true average value). But the only way to control for actual skill would be to use the same armies and same terrain every game.

Their "skill" comes from a great understanding of the.. power of retail! Therefore there attitudes are often cheap.

When it comes to GW games, attitudes are the only thing that can be cheap.

 Peregrine wrote:

And I've seen the casual mindset drive people from games with endless unwritten rules about what is "cheese", poor knowledge of the rules, condescending attitudes towards new players who are interested in tournaments, etc.

No, you haven't. You are absolutely full of gak.

Also, isn't it a bit hypocritical to criticize behavior you gleefully engage in? You've been the most condescending poster in this forum for years.

Lolwut? This is a joke, right? Tell me you don't seriously believe that gamergate nonsense...

It would be a thread derail to discuss this at any length, but I think if game companies listened to actual gamers about what they wanted rather than a charlatan with no actual investment or interest in the field, we'd have less predatory business practices, better games, and a healthier industry. The best thing that can be said about Anita Sarkeesian is that she kinda understood SOME of the discredited feminist theories she lazily applied to games she's never played - she's like if Jack Thompson and Jack Chick had a stupid baby.

I keep seeing people talk about balance, but when it comes down to it, something like 40k is literally impossible to balance (without making concessions that most people wouldn't want). For instance, if you have an amphibious unit costed at X points on a map with no water - that's wasted points. But if you are on a map with lots of water, that unit might be worth twice what his points cost is. Not only are point not adequate in representing the changing value of this unit, there's really only two ways to balance it - you either never play on a map with water (and thus the unit is never played because it wastes valuable points) or you create a more granular version of the points that makes it obnoxious (like unit is worth X points, on maps with water, X + Y points).

Ultimately, what happens is that in an effort to take a wide, expansive, and variable game and make it balanced, the end result is options being continually removed from the game. If you want to be "competitive" in 40k, you will not even consider using at least half of the models available to you. Scenarios which venture into interesting territory, or maps which are no symmetrical with a very limited subset of features, become "unfair" and "unbalanced" because the only way to not give an advantage to one player over the other is to literally give the same thing to both players. To add insult to injury, players like to treat dice rolls like having a 60% chance is fair because every player gets the same 60% chance, but it is entirely possible for a player to roll poorly on five or six rolls in a row, significantly destroying any ability to strategize over the course of a game. Competitive play eventually becomes "of the 10% of the game we are allowed to experience, this player made good decisions and his dice rolls conveniently fell right of the middle in the Bell Curve".

I think competitive players hate casual players because casual players want more added to the game, even if it isn't very good or only very rarely good. The strategy for competitive games of 40k is more about what you don't play with rather than what you do. When GW decides to get a bit narrative and starts adding a bunch of weird things to the game (something like Urban Conquest, for example, or building your own tanks from Chapter Approved), the end result is something that competitive gamers will ignore - but will also resent. And because they resent GW not catering to their needs, they also resent the gamers who enjoy these efforts.

I remember in Age of Sigmar when they released a model (I think it was a White Dwarf anniversary model) which didn't have a point value for matched play, and the competitive players went ballistic. Actually, Age of Sigmar, in general, when it released without point values created such an uproar in the community. At that point, most non-competitive wargamers had actually left wargames, and all that was left was competitive players - and they could not wrap their heads around the idea that something didn't have points. The amount of vitriol was truly amazing over something so small and trivial... Balance for a casual player is a game that feels like they are involved and doing things the whole game, and wounds or warscroll limitations can create those kind of games. Balance for competitive players is a game where you build armies to give yourself so much of an advantage that you've probably won before you even play the game.

You know, I think AoS and 40k have brought back a lot of the more casual players, and if they released a game without points now, I think it would go over much better. I think it was that AoS did it when casuals were more or less excised from the community that it got as bad as it did. In a way, it created a community without competitive players, which might be while AoS still has the most friendly and helpful playerbase of any miniature game out there.

 akaean wrote:
But matched play remains the most efficient way to get a one off game in with strangers. And that is why points are so important.

Part of that, though, is that nobody has tried anything else. When GW said, during early AoS, to bring one hero, one monster, several units, no more than 30 wounds - very few people actually tried it. The ones that did usually said that they got a good game out of it. Granted, they weren't power gamers looking to exploit every limitation towards their own dominance, but it worked for the 6 people who bothered to try it. If I tried it and played against another people who exploited the system to build a power army, I'd blame him personally, but somehow, we've arrived at the conclusion that the system was at fault for not factoring in that wargaming if filled with people who "model for advantage" wherever they can get away with it.

We don't need POINTS. We need a system that creates a decent game - and there are several of them out there that either don't use points, or when they do, don't use them primarily. For instance, Path to Glory creates a slow grow campaign without points. Actually, campaign systems in general do very well here, such as Firestorm, Urban Conquest, Necromunda's Dominion campaign, and so on - the goals of the games are not about winning ONE game, so per-game imbalances are largely unimportant.

Being able to set up and play one off games is hugely important for growing a community, and a points system is one of the most efficient ways of eyeballing balance between two forces on a gaming table, its not perfect, but... its better than nothing.

But it probably isn't better than something else. Or better yet, a lot of somethings. There are other solutions to points out there that... well, to be perfectly frank, I think that points are the reason why competitive players even exist in the first place. When we talk about them, it is almost always about the list building and rarely about the playing (after all, how can you stomp a newbie if your lists are equal power?). Using points gives them an excuse to build the most abusive lists they can, because we allow it. The points say these two armies are equal, so who are we to disagree?

But imagine that there were a dozen different common list building formats out there. One uses wounds, one power levels, one price based (no more than $200 worth of models), one based on limiting warscrolls, one path to glory, one skirmish, one firestorm, and so on. If there was someone who exploited one of those formats, he would not be able to exploit the other ones at the same time. It's because we've made points the standard that we've allowed this abusive list building exploitation to become standard as well. If we played more than one type of game, it would solve the problem largely because the individual values of each model would change with each type of game, making "list building for advantage" virtually impossible

That was the biggest problem with AOS' release. People would show up to an FLGS with players they didn't know very well, and it was really difficult to find a balance between the armies and create relatively fair games.

I think this was exaggerated and largely a hypothetical put forth by the competitive players who didn't actually play the game. The idea that people would show up with a dozen bloodthirsters just because the rules didn't say they couldn't was one born from paranoia rather than experience.

Playing without points is easier if you always play the same people and know eachother and units inside and out. It doesn't work so well in new environments...

Because competitive players have literally made us afraid of playing with each other. The way they've ruined the game community is so absolute that the idea that we might have to confront these players and negotiate a fair game has us quaking in our boots.

 Horst wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
Because competitive players have literally made us afraid of playing with each other. The way they've ruined the game community is so absolute that the idea that we might have to confront these players and negotiate a fair game has us quaking in our boots.

Oh come on, that's a bit hyperbolic, don't you think?

Yes. A bit. But there is some truth to it as well. Non-competitive players are afraid to play competitive players, and they are worried for any system which could potentially expose them to competitive behaviors and attitudes. The biggest complaints about AoS's lack of point were A) how do we know we'll get a balanced game where one side doesn't accidentally stomp the other? and B) how do we prevent the jerks from exploiting this open ended system to intentionally stomp their opponent? There is a terror of being stomped in this hobby, and it is entirely justified.

I'm perfectly okay playing a game I know I'm going to lose. I walk away happy if I feel like I did a good job in a bad situation. I'm not okay being stomped. There's something demoralizing about only being able to watch your opponent, without much of a chance to play, yourself. To me, a good game isn't about balance, but about being involved and active during the entire game.

Any 2 given casual players will often have drastically mistmatched forces. Say one guy likes to play nothing but tanks in his Guard army, and the other player likes to play a genestealer cults army with lots of abberants and other nasty gribblies. You think the Guard player is going to have a fun, fair game when the Genestealer player assaults his entire army from turn and prevents him from ever firing again?

Yeah, see, that's never going to happen. Casual players aren't stubborn like competitive players. If one player wants to play one thing and the other player wants to play another, they will usually play two games. Then something else for a third. Being experience focused rather than competitively focused means that they'll try out various unknown experiences, and repeat the ones they most enjoy. If playing that matchup above yielded a poor game, it won't get played a second time - and I think both players would be fine with that outcome.

 LunarSol wrote:

He may actually feel that way. I've certainly had times in my life where I took out my frustrations with how a game was designed on the players and not the game.

That's not entirely accurate. I think the rules of 40k and AoS are absolutely appropriate for casual game "experiences", but fall apart completely at the highly competitive tournament level (which is why few or none of the tournaments use the 40k or AoS rules as written). Playing the games competitively is so out of whack for how these games are designed and intended to be played, that it often seems to me that people who do so are trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. And yet I often see people try to tell me that putting that square peg into the round hole is the right way to do it, and if I don't do it that way, then somehow, it is my fault. Or the peg's fault. Or the hole's fault. But it's never the fault of the idiot who can't see that the two don't fit together.

I used to love competitive Pokemon battles on the Game Boy, but ultimately found myself frustrated with how the competitive community attempted to take balance into their own hands and at odds with the SmogOn crowd. Ultimately though, my issues were with the game itself and had to accept that the reality of the game mechanics didn't line up with how the franchise presented itself to me.

Every single customizable game that has ever been made, and I assume ever will be made, falls apart when you minmax them. That's not the design's fault. It's just that when the edge cases become commonplace, the intent and purpose behind the design is lost to extremes.

It's like drinking water. It's good for you and you should do it often. But if you drink too much, you will die of water poisoning. Our bodies operate within a certain threshold, and when we leave that threshold, we tend to stop functioning so well. Game design is the same way, except that it tends to feel rewarding when you are ultimately poisoning the game.

A lot of people continue to blame the players and while I understand why, ultimately I've decided that neither the game nor the players are elements of the experience within my control, and I'm much happier focusing on the things I can improve for myself without having to force those changes on others.

While there is definitely wisdom in doing what you can to change what you can and not worrying about the rest, I think we've seen this hobby when competitive gamers become the dominant voice in it, and it was not a healthy place to be. By speaking up and making sure that the worst wheel isn't the only one squeaking, maybe we can all get some grease.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 auticus wrote:
I mean at its heart, 40k and AOS are both games pushed to be won in the listbuilding phase before either army hits the table.

Absolutely not. The list building is part of personalization and player identity, and should be viewed in exactly the same manner as which color your paint your models. It is absolutely not intended to be a spreadsheet that you minmax to model your army for advantage. People do that because they can, not because they are supposed to, should, or told to.

In AoS2, every single warscroll ability has been rewritten to come with flavor text. For instance, the Arch-Revenant from Looncurse allows friendly Kuronoth Hunters within 12" reroll hit rolls of 1. But why? "An Arch-Revenant commands instant obedience and commitment from Kuronoth Hunters that are nearby". That rule is designed to enhance the model and give it personality. It's meant to tie the Arch-Revenant to the Kuronoth Hunters thematically - as a rule itself, it is pretty limited. It has relatively little gameplay value, but an immense amount of thematic value. Same with the rule that allows them to sacrifice their spite (giving up flying and pincher attacks) to negate a wound - gameplay-wise, it is basically the same as adding an extra wound to the model, but thematically, it feels almost tragic to use this rule.

The idea that a game should be won or lost in the list building phase is absolutely the last thing GW ever wants to happen. They want your fully painted army to get on that battlefield and tell a story - and the story they want you to tell isn't "I lost because my opponent used a rules exploit to table me on the second turn".

A lot of people approach the game that way.

Square peg. Round hole. These games are primarily thematic and customizable, which is antithetical to competitive.

 Peregrine wrote:

Of course nobody tried it. It's a system that is clearly worse than the conventional point system so why waste time on proving that 1+1=2? The only reason to even consider playing a game that way is because GW, out of sheer unbelievable incompetence, failed to provide anything better and nearly killed half of their company in the process. If you have a functioning point system available there's no reason to use anything else.

It's not worse than regular points. It's pretty much the exact same thing. When there is some ultimate limitation, people will naturally try to minmax it to some degree. So, if one unit is clearly a better value (be it in points or wounds), they'll choose to play that. Just like 2000 points of one army is by no means equal to 2000 points of another army, 30 wounds of one army is not equal to 30 wounds of another army, but for some reason, you think the latter is unbalanced because of it.

My point is that nobody actually tried it. It doesn't matter if it was better or worse - people made assumptions about it and never bothered to test those assumptions. I see people doing mathhammer theorycrafting all the time, making assumptions about how units play based on theories built around faulty premises and misunderstandings of how statistics work. More than anything about the competitive community, I hate how they think they are a lot better at math than they really are.

1) Campaign systems are useless for pickup gaming....A game that fails to support this is, at best, a niche-market product and is likely to be a financial failure.

While games like Frostgrave and Necromunda do technically support pick up games, their popularity is entirely due to campaign play. Granted, most people who play these games are playing with friends on kitchen tables rather than going and playing strangers at game centers - but I think more people play games in this manner than not. With miniature games increasingly targeting solo and coop, I think kitchen table campaign play will become more of the standard way to play miniature games rather than game center competitive matched play with strangers. Being useless for pickup gaming may actually be a selling point one day soon.

3) Campaign systems are extremely vulnerable to snowball effects.

Some are. Some use handicaps. Some use a variety of unbalanced scenarios that can allow even the underdogs to be overpowered in a scenario. And some make it so that the underdogs can gang up against the leader, keeping them in check. I think many, if not most, campaign style games have something in them to slow snowballing, just like many three player games have something in them to keep kingmaking from being the dominant strategy.

Not true at all. Point systems are the single most effective way of evaluating the strength of an army and allowing pickup games between customized forces. Other alternatives either don't work or are just point systems that are less accurate than they could be.

Are they? It should be pointed out that the most popular tournament customizable game doesn't use points at all (Magic the Gathering). There's pickup games of that all the time.

And points will only be an accurate evaluation of any army if they start measuring interactions. For example:
- Multiples tax. Each unit of the same type costs more (having three bloodthirsters is not equal to three times the power of one bloodthirster).
- Combo tax. Units that work well together should cost more when used together than when they are used separately.
- Environment tax. An amphibious ability is worthless in a desert, valuable in a swamp. Pay more for in the swamp.
- Exploitation tax. Certain strategies and combos are absurdly powerful and game breaking. This should be included in the cost of the army divided by the chance of it occurring. A strong strategy that happens once every 10 games should be 10x cheaper than a strong strategy that happens every game - but both should cost something.

And so on. Basing the points only on the internal stats of a unit and ignoring how that unit interacts with the table, the enemy, and its allies will never produce a point value that accurately represents its true value in the game.

1) Most of those list building ideas are just plain terrible. Nobody is going to play a game where you bring $200 worth of models because the dollar cost of the models is a terrible way of evaluating the strength of an army and creating a game where each player has a fair chance of winning. It doesn't matter if a game publisher puts that format in their rulebook, it's going to have zero effect on the game.

I think we've already established that competitive gamers aren't interested in fair games. They want to minmax points in order to give themselves a clear advantage when possible. Whether it is 200 points or $200, that's still possible. My point is that if you have a dozen different systems by which armies are built, it prevents a single meta from defining the value of a model. If you really like a particular character, you can find a format in which he is worth playing.

2) Competitive players can play multiple formats.

But they generally don't. At least in 40k. AoS just released rules for a new Meeting Engagements format for 1000 pt armies, and I guess we'll see if this becomes popular enough to change the meta surrounding AoS - but I get the impression that competitive gamers are far less dominant in AoS, and that AoS players are perfectly happy playing Skirmish, Path of Glory, Meeting Engagements, and 2000 pt Pitched Battles without any one of them becoming the "Right Way to Play". I think AoS's Three Ways to Play is more generalized across the line than 40k's. Like, I think 40k needed Kill Team to be a separate game for people to be okay with playing it, while AoS was okay making Skirmish a minor variation of the regular rules.

Well yes, of course it rarely, if ever, happened outside of theory. Everyone realized how incredibly stupid AoS's army construction rules were as soon as they were published and went straight to work on third-party point systems. And the game was pretty much dead until those third-party point systems were established. So no, "nobody really exploited that" isn't very convincing when the reason is that nobody was playing AoS until the exploit was no longer legal.

This is some revisionist history.

 Peregrine wrote:

This seems rather out of touch with reality. 40k is designed to support pickup games. AoS is designed to support pickup games. LOTR is designed to support pickup games. Kill Team is designed to support pickup games (and has a whole competitive play expansion to go with its campaign system). Blood Bowl is designed to support pickup games. In fact, the only GW games that aren't designed with support for pickup games are what, some of the more niche-market fantasy ones? And going outside of the dominant company in the market X-Wing is designed primarily for pickup games, WM/H is designed primarily for tournament-style pickup games, Infinity is designed to support pickup games, etc. In fact I can't honestly think of a major game on the market that isn't either designed primarily for pickup-style games or at least giving support to that style of play.

It doesn’t take a genius to see where the industry is going. Campaigns are becoming more omnipresent, while matched play is increasing less emphasized. Walking Dead: All Out War, Fallout (and Skyrim), Rangers of the Shadow Deep, most Osprey games (Frostgrave, Last Days, Ragnarok, Dracula’s America, etc), Necromunda, Blood Bowl, Warhammer Quest. Then look at some of the recent expansions for other games. Kill Team had Rogue Trader, Armada’s next expansion is a campaign, Infinity’s latest book adds the Paradiso campaign, Warmachine is getting Oblivion, 40k recently got Urban Chaos, Middle Earth has Gondor at War, AoS has Path of Glory and Firestorm - and we don’t even know what is going on with Warcry yet (all signs point to a campaign game).

At the very least, you can say that there is enough interest in campaign games to support several popular game systems (Frostgrave, Necromunda), new games are being created that are campaign focused (Fallout, Skyrim, Rangers of the Shadow Deep), and that even older miniature games are now starting to see the value in campaign games. I mean, Warmachine is getting a campaign. Warmachine!

Maybe, 40k’s tournament style is like Magic or World of Warcraft. There’s really only room for one big one and everybody else is scrambling around for table scraps. You can find a game of 40k at your local game shop, but will it be a fun one? Meanwhile, Infinity is nowhere to be seen in the local meta. Sooner or later, they are going to realize that they’ll find more success appealing to kitchen table gamers over tournament gamers. Campaign games are just the first volley in that particular salvo. Next, I think AI opponents and solo/coop play is going to be the big thing (WD:AOW, Fallout, Skyrim, WHQ, Rangers of the Shadow Deep, Deadzone). AI opponents is a relatively new feature, but it is going to become increasingly common and tournament gamers will end up being replaced by tables and dice rolls - to the hobby’s benefit. Nobody really likes pickup games. As soon as necessary evils stop being necessary, people stop doing them.

Slipspace wrote:
That all seems like it's grasping at straws a bit. All of those systems you mention are insignificant in terms of market share even when compared to relatively smaller games like Infinity or Malifaux and are entirely inconsequential next to the likes of 40k,

With the exception of a few games, the entirety of miniature gaming is small potatoes. A healthy industry has variety in purpose and audience, but competitive gaming does allow for variety of purpose or audience. The smaller games must differentiate themselves from the market leader to find a niche audience - and that can’t happen with a competitive mindset. And remember, Infinity isn’t just competing against 40k. It’s also competing against board games (especially with Aristeia and Defiance). Increasingly, miniature games are being hybridized with the board game market.

However, I wouldn't call any of the games you've listed as being particularly popular or relevant in the market when taken as a whole. They're small fry. That in itself is possibly an indication that your argument is flawed - the biggest games aren't of the type you're saying the industry is headed towards.

But that’s my point. Something like Frostgrave could NEVER succeed as a competitive game. The market can’t support many of those. Because it is purely a kitchen table miniature game, it has found success (a dozen expansions, two spin offs, and a miniature line) despite originally intended to be a one off book and nothing more.

The most successful companies are producing pick-up games as their most successful products.

But there’s only 2 of them (GW, FFG). The next biggest miniatures line is D&D unpainted! Games like Warmachine are only popular when 40k is not. Competitive gaming is a zero sum game. Competitive gamers are neither created nor destroyed, they just change games. That’s an industry that can not grow or even really support the sheer volume of miniatures being released ever month.

The reason seems simple to me: convenience. The big problem all campaign-style games have always had is the extra effort required to run them and the inability to easily just jump in whenever you want. They cater to a small part of an already niche group.

Board games like Imperial Assault, Shadows of Brimstone, Arkham Horror, Arcadia Quest, etc are all more popular than Infinity or Malifaux. Campaigns aren’t the problem. The problem is that campaign players usually don’t all invest in their own copies of the game. How do you sell a player on something like that when they have to buy the books and miniatures, then list build before they even know if they like it?

auticus wrote:The vast bulk of all 40k games played in my area are pickup games.

How would you know, when they aren’t playing where you can see them? I think for every game of 40k you see, there’s probably a dozen games you don’t see, played in dens or on kitchen tables.

akaean wrote:Pick up games are an important part of a hobby.

Not for board games. And that industry is arguably heartier and more successful than the miniature game hobby (it does have an unsustainable addiction to kickstarter though). At the very least, there is plenty of room in that hobby for expansion and different player types.

That is ridiculous. Book 1 and Book 2 Malifaux 2E were point based and exceptionally well balanced,

And what happened with books 3 and beyond? Out can balance small games or a known, static version of the game. Infinitely expanding games ALWAYS become increasingly unbalanced over time. M2E’s first two books were written at the same time, balancing the existing models from 1E. After that, new models changed the formula. You can’t successful chase balance as a moving target. Not for long.

Warlord's Bolt Action is points based and while far from perfect is far closer to balanced than GW. The 9th Age is more balanced than any edition of WFB that I had played.

Haven’t played these, but isn’t Bolt Actions between armies of roughly similar abilities and make up? And does 9th Age have new releases to catch up to?

 gorgon wrote:

Yeah, it's obvious that if one was going to design a game for more competitive play, it wouldn't have 40K's number of factions and subfactions and detachments and formations, all loaded onto a creaky and straining points system for balance. You'd keep it tighter and focused, and build more balance directly into the ruleset.

A truly competitive game would require something like Magic's rotation, where specific models (probably older ones) are purposely excluded from tournament play in an effort to create a tightly controlled ruleset. As it is, 40k has 30 years of models available and accessible - probably close to 500 individual unit types across two dozen factions, and freeform tables with a dozen different terrain types, in a dozen different formats. Honestly, "good enough" balance for 40k is still an incredible achievement. But it's never, ever going to be the competitive game experience that people want to make it. Even Warmachine, the tournament game of choice in mk2, was buckling under the weight of its ever expanding options.


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 Peregrine wrote:

1) Focusing on coop/solo at-home play is inherently kind of an underdog strategy.

Currently. But the market is changing. I feel like miniature games are following the same basic trajectory that the board game industry did, just slower. Right now, we are kind of in the CCG boom - tournament and competitive play defines the market, but it is starting to change. Miniature gaming has been growing over the past few years, and what the market looks like now is completely different from even when AoS launched.

I think solo/coop play is a GREATLY underrepresented market in miniature gaming. In fact, outside of Fallout and Rangers of the Shadow Deep, I don't think there's any full on miniature games which hit that focus. And, watching the board game community, solo gaming has gone from a novelty (Race For the Galaxy had an AI player this one time) to something that is featured in nearly every game, and one of the first questions asked of any kickstarter. The "solitaire games on your table" geek list on BGG has gone from a dozen entries a month to 973 for June 2019.

People like to buy models, build and paint them, and they like playing with them - but they don't like packing 50 models and traveling an hour to the nearest game center for the chance of playing a game. Playing with children, wives, and girlfriends is a market that competitive miniature games does not target, nor solo game experiences. But that's going to be the biggest room for growth in this industry going forward.

And you might notice that FFG has effectively killed off Imperial Assault, the game that is the closest fit for what you claim is the future of miniatures gaming, in favor of a 40k-style alternative in Legion.

You forget that FFG has to share profits with Hasbro on Imperial Assault. They can't even sell Imperial Assault on their own website. They have the miniatures license for Star Wars and tried to pass Imperial Assault off as a miniatures game, but it didn't work. Even then, FFG is still releasing digital expansions for the game through the app - solo/cooperative expansions. In fact, the solo/coop app was so popular for Imperial Assault (and Descent) that they now have multiple games that use that format (Mansions of Madness and Journeys In Middle Earth). The just released Star Wars: Outer Rim also has a solo mode. In fact, I think FFG releases more soloable games than not these days - and I remember when it was a novelty with the Gears of War board game.

Edit: Imperial Assault is even getting a new mode with the new Skirmish map. Some sort of horde defense raid mode that incorporates the app. So Imperial Assault is still getting development, even if miniature design is focused on Legion right now.

X-Wing just got a 2.0 reboot (a perfect opportunity to introduce the kind of things you believe are the future) that continued its focus on pickup/tournament style gaming while adding essentially nothing for solo/coop play. It's pretty clear based on FFG's business decisions that they do not agree with you about the future of the market.

X-Wing 2.0 was contentious for many reasons and it was pretty obvious from the get go that deviating too far from the expected would've been disastrous. That's because competitive gamers hate change and their obsessive need to control the game prevents it from every expanding beyond their own selfish wishes. And it's obvious that X-Wing has lost a considerable amount of popularity through the edition change, to the point where now Legion is more popular. Competitive gamers keep games from growing, then abandon them at the earliest sign of fault, making for a notoriously fickle audience that will kill your game overnight (Warmachine mk3?)

stratigo wrote:
Oh Oracle, regale us with your knowledge of the future!

Sell your Google stock, invest in solar panels, and learn Chinese. Also, war never changes.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
Currently. But the market is changing.

{citation needed}

Because the board game market already HAS changed. There is increasingly little difference between the miniature and board game market - to the point where board game manufacturers have full on miniature games now.

The companies that make up the market are not changing, and it doesn't matter what some niche-market company is doing with their 0.1% market share.

How can you say that when GW is completely different to what it was three or four years ago? Warmachine is in deep trouble. X-Wing is no longer the top miniature game. Miniature companies are trying to break into board games (Aristeia, Warhammer Quest, Defiance, Underworlds) while board game companies are trying to break into miniature games (FFG, CMON). Kickstarter has completely changed how games are funded and made. How in the hell can you say that the market isn't changing?

It doesn't matter if there are 973 games on BGG if the total sales revenue of those games is $10.

Oh, they are doing fine. Middara (1-4 player cooperative game) has a kickstarter going right now that has made over $2 million (and still has 18 days to go). Gloomhaven's second printing kickstarter made almost $4 million. Kingdom Death Monster, $12 million. Zombicides routinely make around $4 million. Dark Souls $4 million. Assassin's Creed over a million. Bloodborne $4 million. All solo/coop games.

How exactly can this be the future of miniatures gaming if you can't think of more than two niche-market games that fit your vision of the future?

Because Rangers of the Shadow Deep and Fallout Wasteland Warfare are NEW. It's easy to see the direction the industry is going if you look at the recent successes. Both these games are less than a year old and wildly successful beyond their initial goals. In fact, Rangers of the Shadow Deep was one popular board game reviewer's #2 game of all time. And Fallout was successful enough that they aren't just expanding the line, but creating a Skyrim spin off. Meanwhile, The Other Side - a major effort by the Malifaux guys - made as much impact as a fart in the wind and appears to be dead already. CMON's Song of Ice and Fire seems to be doing okay, but it is majorly propped up by the tv show finale hype and it'll be little more than a rumored part of history in a year.

 Peregrine wrote:

GW's annual revenue: $275 million.

Total sales of all of those games you mention, combined: $31 million.

GW isn't making all that money on models. They sell books and license out their IPs for video games and yoga pants. And a large portion of what GW sells is not explicitly competitive focused, like paints and terrain. If you look at GW's products that are explicitly competitive... there's only a handful, like the KT Arena expansion. Most releases include that Three Ways to Play thing, so are of value to non-competitive players as well - certainly to the point where it is impossible to say that competitive or non-competitive players are the primary purchasers of any one product.

And by the way, Asmodee North America's annual revenue is $500 million (and it is all kitchen tabletop gaming), so shut up.

Sunno wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:
Warmachine is in deep trouble.

Im sorry that is simply untrue. It has gone through some testing times after the release of Mk3 but much of that has been fixed. PP as a company has also done well with MonPoc and they have announced another full wargame is coming net year. Hardly the moves of a company that is in toruble.

I said Warmachine was in trouble, not PP. They've lost a lot of players and have dropped from the second biggest game to not even on the chart, and a lot of FLGS have stopped carrying the line. The tournament mindset is what essentially destroyed that game, inside and out, and one of the major reasons why I rail against this mindset.

I'm a huge MonPoc fan, and I'm thrilled that the line is doing well (the stuff they showed at L&L was great). I'm even looking forward to their new Warcasters game, and I may even try out Riot Quest - but Warmachine is basically dead to me (and a lot of other people).

Since 40k is not a tactically complex game, it should be possible to make a computer simulation which runs two lists against each other a few hundred times, then spitting out a balance number based on wins versus losses. "These two lists are compatible" or "List B has a serious advantage over list A". Based on the win-loss ration (and the severity of loss), it could suggest an appropriate handicap value, allowing the disadvantaged list to add X points worth of models. I'd be really curious to know that X handicap would be between the most competitive list and the most casual one. I suspect it is large.

 Horst wrote:

This is obviously not possible. Chess is not a "tactically complex game", you simply choose which pieces you move, and which pieces take other pieces. It has a defined grid of 64 spaces. It is not solved by a computer simulation yet, there too many possible permutations of the board.

Warhammer 40k has significantly more possible moves and interactions. It is absolutely not a computer solvable game.

First, it wouldn't be solving the game. It would simply be playing the game. The same AI opponent playing two different teams against each other using the same basic decision making process - this would be the control for "player skill", with the relative powers between the lists themselves be the variable tested. Instead of creating a mathematical equation to calculate this stuff, it simply brute forces it - playing thousands or even millions of match ups between the two. Law of really big numbers says that the more data points you have, the closer the results should approach the average.

Second, the simulation does not need to be a true one to one simulation of playing 40k. A simplified model of play could be designed that is easy for a computer to calculate in a rough approximation of the game. For instance, movement can get kind of twisty, with each model moving individually in cohesion. There's things that matter there for charging and piling in, not to mention blocking, but for the most part, the computer can just treat a unit of models as a single object, maybe even breaking the field into a grid (computers love grids). We don't need to create a true 40k AI (though I'm sure that could be great for solo play). Again, you just need to control for player skill, so having an inefficiently played list should be okay as long as the same inefficiencies play out on both sides. As long as the model maintains a relative power balance with the real game, the results should be largely applicable.

Third, the results will not guarantee a particular outcome. Because of the way dice work and the way different terrain can have an affect, playing even the same game a dozen times could yield vastly different results. I suspect that a competitive list will have a near 100% win rate against a casual list of the same points, but I think that most of the time, even a list which wins 80% of the time could yield a good game between most players if the win margins for that list is relatively small.

Nobody is going to get paid to play Warhammer 40k because Warhammer 40k is, like, the most boring thing to watch in the world. It's like the whole experience is waiting through your opponent's turn without having your own models.

They could jazz it up, to some degree, but competitive players are not about the spectacle and pageantry of the game. It might be possible to become a professional Golden Demon painter, because "look at this cool thing this very talented person did" is going to bring in a bigger audience than "this guy moved a bunch of models around on the table slightly better than the other guy".

You want to make 40k a professional thing - you do teams. A hobby guy and a player guy. Then you put the camera on the fething table rather than hovering 3 feet above it. Get some action angles that put you in the game. You overlay the dice rolls and game state changes on top of the screen, like how televised poker puts each player's hand up and the odds of drawing specific cards.

Then you find some players that aren't a bunch of mathhamer neckbeards. Ever hear GW staff on Voxcast talk about their models? They give them names and back stories. You want to see Sqorin Hammerfarf succeed, not generic Dwarven Skirmisher #3 of 8. You want to know how many battles that guy has been in, how many near deaths he faced, and how many times he's made the winning kill. You want to see when that model is finally retired and given a hero's send off. Give them some stats to follow. Make it about the army rather than just about the player.

You can play competitively all you want, but if you want to sell 40k as a spectator sport, you have to have something that people want to spectate. No spectators, no sponsors, no money.

 gorgon wrote:
Perhaps a different game from a GW with a different mindset and approach. Not 40K, and not this GW.

I don't know. I think I'd probably watch a season of Necromunda. Get some high quality tables with close-to-the-action camera angles (sector mechanicus is a joy to look at with all the catwalks), follow the dramatic stories of different gangs as they grow, get injured, or die. But I'm not really a sports guy, so seeing two players trying to get points doesn't really do anything for me. Pageantry and drama is what works for me.

For the record, Corvus Belli has put together some really high production value battle reports with lots of overlays and info, dramatic camera angles, and even animations that really make them fun to watch. That's what needs to happen to make 40k a spectator sport, but putting out something of this quality during a live game would be a logistical challenge, to be sure.

bouncingboredom wrote:
This was what pushed me out of WHFB. I had miniatures that I liked, but because they weren't the power choices I had two choices; fork out for practically a whole new army or just play an older edition. For the most part I chose the later.

But that's not the only two choices you had. But what you could've done is asked for a handicap of some sort - start off with an extra small unit, or a bonus victory point, some extra command points, or given the unit a tough-like attribute where if you roll a 6, it ignores that wound. Or heck, play a scenario that favors your terrible models. There were very easy and obvious ways for you to play an underpowered army. Anyone who looks at your troop choice and laughs will not have a problem giving you a small bonus to make the match more sporting.

I'm more of an open play type of guy (one the few, apparently), so there's no unit or model that I'm not okay with playing. I just have to figure out the right circumstances in which to play it. I guess you could say that I fit the game to the models, rather than fitting the models to the game.

 Kirasu wrote:
I just have not seen a tournament player have spew such open vitriol at non-tournament players in the same way.

Really? I guess you missed the opening post, when it still had the facebook posts. Or, really, anything Peregrine has ever posted. Also, I'm sure, if you want, I could provide some links to some Warmachine discussions on playing nicely with new/casual players. Or, heck, what about the first year of posts surrounding Age of Sigmar.

I came to Dakka Dakka with the release of Age of Sigmar. It wasn't my first miniatures game, but after having kids, it had been about 10 years since I used to play Warmachine Mk1. I am not a casual gamer, but I mainly come from video games, and Age of Sigmar with, what we now call, Open Play was something of a revelation to me. I loved it. It was like playing Minecraft. If I felt like doing this, I could. If I felt like doing that, I could. It really allowed me to explore the game in whatever manner I felt. And let me tell you, coming in with no expectations, the dialogue surrounding Age of Sigmar in that first year was... well, let's go with "offputting". If you were there, you'd remember. If you weren't, you'd think my description of it was an exaggeration.

I was enjoying Age of Sigmar so much, I decided to join a local Warmachine group that my brother-in-law was in. The Press Ganger wouldn't play anyone without full tournament lists. One day, there was just the two of us there. I asked if he wanted to play a quick, small game (I only had a small army to play), and he said, let's wait for more people to show up before we start. After ten minutes of us just sitting there, staring off into space, someone showed up with a full tournament list and he played the press ganger while I sat there for another twenty minutes waiting for someone else to show up. There was no vitriol there, but boy did it make me feel like gak. And this was the press ganger - the person in charge of bringing new players into Warmachine!

And I know someone is going to come in and say, well, that guy was an donkey-cave. He wasn't really (though after that, I don't think we said more than 10 words to each other - our opportunity to socialize was basically destroyed). He was just rigid in how he wanted to play the game. And he wasn't the only one. I didn't quit playing Warmachine after that situation. It took more - a lot more - before I was finally like, "well, this just isn't working. I'll stick with Age of Sigmar and weather the insults for enjoying it".

But that rigidity is really the problem. Nobody has any problems with tournament players who can easily play casual or narrative games. The ones that take easy lists against new players, and make suboptimal moves to give them a fun first experience. People have problems with tournament players who can't turn it off. Who are all tournaments, all the time. The ones who look at a game without points and choose to insult the game and the people who enjoy it rather than simply going, "well, that game isn't for me, I'll go spend my efforts on games that are". The ones who go into non-tournament campaign games with a tournament mindset, and ruin the entire campaign for everyone involved. Nobody has a problem with playing tournament style, they have a problem with the rigidity of the tournament mindset.

Wayniac wrote:
The sort of person who made up boogeymen during Open Play AOS about "10 Nagashes" or whatever horsegak as "proof" that Open Play was busted, because without rules to stop people from being donkey caves, they'll be donkey caves, and scoffs at the very idea of talking to your opponent before a game other than "2000 points, Eternal War?" as the most conversation.

This reminds me of when they polled a bunch of people who said that they'd never vote for an atheist president. When asked why, the majority of the answers were, without the threat of hell, what's to keep atheists from just going around and murdering and raping? In my head, the only thing I can think is, "Is the only reason these people aren't going around murdering and raping because the rules told them not to? Holy crap".

Ironically, when put to the test, it turns out that atheists tend to dictate themselves in a more moral fashion because their morality is not based on explicit rules, and thus there are fewer loopholes to exploit that allow them to feel like a good person for following the rules, while also doing bad things. There was this complaint thread on Reddit a few days ago from waitresses complaining about how the Sunday crowd will tip with bible verses or chick tracts instead of money.

That's neither here nor there, but I do get the impression from many with the tournament mindset that if the rules allow it (or explicitly don't disallow it) then it is fair game. They are still good players even though they are hella-cheating just because there isn't a specific rule that says it is cheating.

Wayniac wrote:
Don't forget CAAC

I think Peregrine coined that one.

But yeah, playing with people who share your ideas of the game is the best advice, and also the hardest.

But that's its own kind of rigidity too. I think it is more important to be flexible in how you play. The greatness of games like AoS and 40k is in the breadth and variety of experiences you can have with them. You can have a really cutthroat competitive game with them, a big narrative campaign, a beer and pretzels fun time, a test to see if 40 space marines can take on big monster, or paint them all to look like Hello Kitty. You'll get more out of the games if you can do (and enjoy) all of those.

Wayniac wrote:
It's far too common that you have a variety of people who want different things from the game, are unable to come to any sort of compromise (this is on both people, not just the competitive one) and as a result, neither has a fun game and thinks the other side sucks.

That kind of sums up this whole thread, doesn't it?

Deadnight wrote:

Though you are not necessarily wrong, being 'flexible in how you play' is all well and good, but ultimately meaningless when you are the only one willing, or interested in playing, or acomodating that 'flexibility' with different players/styles of games. Which goes back to my point - play with like minded people. If you want flexibility in what/how you play, you really need to find people who want the same. But we are arguing semantics really.

Well, if you can play with anyone, you'll never be for want of someone to play with. The problem is, if you like lots of parts of the game and only get to see a very small part of all that, it can be pretty frustrating. Also, though I'm willing to play matched play, I have an intense dislike of min-maxing, so I'd make a particularly bad tournament-style opponent - so, I might play with others, but they won't play with me.

But I might have to be more accommodating, simply because I don't think anyone else actually plays like I do. Jervis does. Whenever I read an article by him, I feel like, finally! Someone gets it! Only to then come online and see 40 page threads about how what he said was stupid and he should feel bad. Every time I see someone complain that Open Play is stupid and isn't really a thing, I get all sad inside, like someone took my candy and kicked me in the nards.

That said, whilst being rigid in what you want isn't necessarily wrong (people like what people like. If that happens to be one thing, then that's fair. If it happens to be one thing that I don't particularly care for, then there also fair - I will at the very least be polite about it). I largely agree with the premise that flexibility in what/how you play is a good thing. Competitive gaming is fun, and has a niche, but I've burned out from it twice, both with 40k and warmachine. Narrative is more what I enjoy now. It takes a fair bit more work to 'game-build' to judge/eyeball rosters/objectives etc, and get right, but for me at least, putting in that amount of work is worth it. In my experience, Having that variety of playing, or evenvexperiencing the varieties of competitive, open and narrative games broadens your horizons and gives you a far better appreciation for enjoying different things and increases the shelf life of your hobby massively.

I feel like Minecraft is a really good example. A competitive player is the type who goes into the game thinking, I'm going to win this game. These are the steps I have to take to get to the dragon, what I need to beat him, and the most efficient way to do this. The narrative player is the type who thinks, I'm going to build a giant castle with my friends, where I will build the basic blueprint, Ted will be in charge of making the throne room, and Phil is going to make the stables. The open play player is the kind that goes, oh hey, this red stone stuff is cool, I'm going to build a working Atari 2600 emulator out of it, because Minecraft isn't a game, it's a toolbox.

The competitive player takes structure and produces efficiency.
The narrative player takes structure and produces experiences.
The open player takes components and builds his own structure.

solkan wrote:

 Sqorgar wrote:

The competitive player takes structure and produces efficiency.
The narrative player takes structure and produces experiences.
The open player takes components and builds his own structure.

Those categories aren't mutually exclusive.

I never said they were, though I can see how you would think the classifications could be mutually exclusive from the way I posted them. In a previous post, I said that it is the rigidity of tournament players that is a problem, and that these kinds of games are really much better if you try to experience all that they offer.

Deadnight wrote:
Sqorgar' - Your narrative player sounds like a three man painting team doing a diorama. Or building a themed board. As a narrative player, I also view a rules system as a 'toolbox' as much as your 'open play player' - it's a tool to build interesting games/face-offs and scenarios. And when I speak about building scenarios, I see this as encompassing every aspect of 'the game', from terrain layout/function, opposing/complimentary forces, missions/goals/objectives etc. 'Structures' and 'experiences' are functional facets of the same type of creativity.

Well, right. I mean, the Minecraft players that build giant castles or adventure maps for their friends to go through are using the toolbox for all that it is worth. They look at red stone and wonder to what ends it could be used in their favor.

it's a tool to build interesting games/face-offs and scenarios.

Requoting this line because it more or less underscores the idea that you are not trying to win games, but instead create interesting experiences with them.

The main difference is my experience is open play is more freeform in that things like 'a space marine, a tyranid hive tyrant, and a tau stormsurge walk into a bar and decide to hook up to fire some guns at the range' or 'monstrous creature wrestling' is as acceptable a game as anything else, whereas a narrative player will probably raise an eyebrow at calling it 'narrative'. And bear in mind, this is not to say those things couldn't be fun.

I think open play is nebulous and hard to define because, by nature, it has very little structure by itself. But I see open play as... well, if Minecraft is a game and a toolkit for making games, then it is also a kind of programming language - a toolkit for making toolkits.

For instance, I've had it in the back of my head for years to do a campaign system where the objectives on the board are paint pots, and the goals of playing the game is to collect paint that you then paint your armies with. Denying a green paint to an orc army, or just seeking out washes (ignoring bases and layers) with a white undercoat are valid strategies. What kind of orc can you paint without green and only drybrush paints? Don't know, but it would demand some creativity and could produce unexpectedly cool results. And, of course, painted armies play better on the battlefield. That's just common sense. It'd be one the most expensive campaign systems ever devised though.

A paint pot campaign is very meta, to the point where you have to step outside the game rules and purpose to create new game rules and purpose - and a paint pot campaign could potentially be narrative or competitive! Now that I'm thinking of it, you could have a competitive narrative campaign. None of this stuff is mutually exclusive. They are more like layers. To the person building the scenarios, campaigns, and rules packets, he'll probably dip into all three, while the players can choose their own level of involvement. In a narrative campaign, even though there is generally one "game master", it is the responsibility of all the players to work together towards the goal of making a good experience, since narrative games can usually be easily broken by minmaxing.

With respect, while you probably don't intent it, and probably mean it in the best possible way, it comes across as a little bit of 'gatekeeping' on your behalf when you ascribe all the positive things to what you personally like And all the negative things to things you don't, as you frequently do with regard to competitive games/players, and just seem to misunderstand the other things. If anything, it's probably how I'm picking up your signal here though - like I said, it's probably not deliberate, or anywhere near deliberately malicious on your part.

I'm not really making judgement calls on any of it. To me, everything about making and playing games is fair game. Heck, I'd be fine playing competitively, and the only reason I don't is that I refuse to spend the money needed to buy models I don't like just to be successful at the game. When I played Warmachine, I looked into it and discovered that, to play the way I wanted to play, I had to buy not just a warcaster I didn't like, but also multiples of various units I didn't like (if I remember correctly, it was a Butcher list with multiple Doom Reavers). If it were a video game with lower cost associated with army building, I'd be more than happy to make an attempt at playing at high levels of competency. But miniatures are freaking expensive and that's nothing compared to having to paint 30 models I don't like - I've done that before, and it's just not how I like to spend my precious hobby time.

I'll say it again. I have no problem with tournament games, but I do have a problem with the tournament mindset. Not only do I think most (or all) games break down at high levels of minmaxing, I also think the attitude is positively destructive to communities. Warmachine was dying way before Mk3 because of how abusive the community could be to casual and newbie players. Not even hostile. Just abusive. The premise that you will have to lose 20 games before you will win is accepted as a selling point, when nobody is going to invest in a massive, tournament-sized army for a few hundred bucks just to lose at a game they aren't enjoying for 30-40 hours. It sounds good to the people who did it - the Spartan infants left on hills to die which made it, but you can't have a healthy game community by killing 19 out of every 20 new players.

I'm just surprised that you are surprised that the Internet would say this back.

To quote the immortal C3P0, "sometimes, I just don't understand human behavior".

Forums are what they are - a skewed/different perspective, that tends to self-select from the more serious and competitive players in the community, rather than those from any other viewpoint. Plenty people play like you do. They just don't tend to go online and get involved in the 'General discussion' or 'tactics' boards- maybe 'painting/modelling is weirdly, more of a home. There's only a handful of narrative players here, and only a very few of us, for example, get involved with anything approaching regularity.

There's self selecting, and then there is actively tar and feathering those who play a different way and running them out of town. When I first came here, with the release of Age of Sigmar, the amount of abuse I had to suffer through just for saying "I like this game" was really beyond the pale. Unfortunately (for everybody, I guess), the only thing I like more than games is arguing on the internet - but I have to assume that this is a rare condition that is not found in most gamers.

Wayniac wrote:
There are tons of smaller companies that manage to run circles around GW's rules with a fraction of the resources.

It's because they are smaller that they can get away with it. If Infinity had as many people playing - and thus trying to break - the game as 40k does, its rules would collapse in exactly the same way. If there's a small exploit that only 1 in 10,000 players will notice, it won't get noticed in Infinity but a half dozen will notice it in 40k, and that exploit will be posted to the internet and become common knowledge. The smaller games aren't better designed, they just have security through obscurity.

I mean, GW isn't trying to make airtight rules though, so somebody pointing out that the rules aren't airtight is just pointing out that they are working as intended. I really don't understand why people play GW games competitively then complain that they aren't competitive enough, when they were never intended to be.

 Peregrine wrote:

Err, no. You can't have it both ways. Either GW deserves credit for trying and only fails because the task is impossible, or GW is deliberately not intending to make competitive games.

Reality isn't black or white. Things can be somewhere on the spectrum between two extremes.

GW does not intend to make these games competitive games - primarily. They do pay lip service to competitive play and since the "three ways to play" and the General's Handbook making points a separate document, they have thrown competitive players a bone. But if you listen to ANY of the designers talk about the game, not a single one of them has a competitive mindset. Almost universally, they talk about the stories behind their characters and the fiction of the game universe over how to maximize competitive advantage. That's not to say that they don't care about competitive players (and their money), but the people making the game are explicitly not competitive players and are designing a game they enjoy playing.

That being said, the points they put out are about as good as it possibly could be, given that points are an extremely imperfect system for determining balance. They update them twice a year based on player response and tournament successes. GW does make an attempt to use them in a way for the betterment and health of the game. They are more successful at breaking up specific strategies than they are providing true balance though, but that's the nature of points.

The problem is, within a week of the points updates, there've been a few thousand games played and hundreds of forum posts applying every mathematical formula to the new balance, essentially breaking it before it even gets a chance to be used. This new understanding of balance informs people's purchases and within two weeks, entire armies built around these imbalances have been purchased. A less popular game, like Malifaux or Infinity - their balance is just as suspect, but mostly shows up in specific combinations of elements that someone might realize early on, but it might take months before this imbalance is so commonly known that it becomes a standard to build armies against.

Malifaux also has strong faction loyalty, to the point where I've seen people say that so-and-so master is overpowered and they won't play as them or against them, and will stick to the masters they enjoy. Balance is somewhat maintained simply by the fact that most people don't bother to use the exploits. Meanwhile, 40k has people who plop down hundreds of dollars to buy entire armies built around exploits that will undoubtedly be errata'd in a few months. Even one of these types of players, not even locally, but regionally, can force an arms race the spreads across a large territory.