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 ClockworkZion wrote:
The catch here is that WotC drove off lots of MtG veterans with their focus to lucrative competive play and making their release schedule to support it: the game is now better suited for competive play, but it is also much less fun than it was in the wackiness of the early editions. There are no free lunches.

While this may be true, I think it's more fair to say WotC drove off veterans by creating defined formats which have distinct barriers to entry. Limited is the most level playing field because everyone buys in for the same amount, veterans get no benefit from having decades of cards and can't outspend other players. Standard is the most sponsored format because it has a lower barrier to entry, which veterans don't like it again because they can't use the entire collection and it constantly turns over. Modern and Legacy are specifically for the rich and veteran players as they can use cards across multiple sets and spend as much money as they want. I think WotC decided to do this more to lower the barrier of entry and to create a sustainable business model.

GW hasn't determined how to get the business model side right other than adding new units and/or rewriting the army books to make good units bad and bad units good. One simple change they could do that would sell more models is introduce a sideboard for armies. Players need to buy more models to field a full list and it allows the armies to counter each other a little better to make up for interactions that would otherwise be OP.

@Barfolomew: your quote tag is wrong.

 Psienesis wrote:
Where I see rules disputes arising in RPGs is more along the lines of someone expects something to work one way "OMG!! I just stabbed that dude for 40 damage with a great sword! He should fall over and be counted prone!" and the rules don't work that way, "If this were real, Bob, you might have a point, but that's not how combat in this game works."

What I usually see in RPG's are rules oversights where some mechanic is presented but just doesn't make sense: something like tackle attacks in RuneQuest being much more deadly than swords, ditto for throws being more deadly than guns in Twilight 2nd edition: or from other end of the spectrum, things like Telepathic psychic attack in RT whichs damage is reduced by Toughness and Armour worn by target, making it totally useless. Another cardinal sin for many RPG's are weapons tables where one or two weapons are simply much better than the rest and there is absolutely no point using anything else. Extreme example perhaps being Bolt weapons in Deathwatch.

Then there are just plain badly designed systems which don't have single point of failure but just suck, overall.

Of course, difference is that Roleplaying Games have GM's whose word is usually a law and they simply overrule or house rule crazy stuff and that's the end of it. "No I don't care how high your Courtier's Manipulation Skill is, you can't talk Yoritomo to Seppuku himself."

I see that, too, from time to time... and yes, definitely agree with you on the bolt-weapons in DW... though I will save my FFG rant for another thread. But such things as that are fairly easily overcome by a competent GM who notices the error, and the effect that it has on gameplay, and says "Yeah, let's fix that" and does with a houserule.

I don't, in a given RPG, see anywhere near the number of disputes and arguments that come up on the same rules, the same points, and with the same head-scratching resolutions that are presented in YMDC, for example.

Barfolomew wrote:
While this may be true, I think it's more fair to say WotC drove off veterans by creating defined formats which have distinct barriers to entry. Limited is the most level playing field because everyone buys in for the same amount, veterans get no benefit from having decades of cards and can't outspend other players. Standard is the most sponsored format because it has a lower barrier to entry, which veterans don't like it again because they can't use the entire collection and it constantly turns over. Modern and Legacy are specifically for the rich and veteran players as they can use cards across multiple sets and spend as much money as they want. I think WotC decided to do this more to lower the barrier of entry and to create a sustainable business model.

Just to demonstrate how different MtG community was back in the early days - I have no idea what you are talking about As I said, MtG was not originally a tournament game. It was a deliberate choice from WotC to make it one. A very successful one, but certain aspects of the game were lost.

Psienesis: Ooh, I too have big FFG rant stored up...must...resist...

I havent bought a gw product since the marine codex. I have this image of what a competitve setting should be and the company continues to take the game in a different direction. I am not complaining, I simply have come to the conclusion that as a competitve player the amount of restrictions that I want is just to much for a tournament organizer. I dont want IA I dont want escalation I want line of sight blocking terrain its just to much, and I dont want to look like a whiner. I rather play a game where I dont have to know 20+ books of rules. Combine that with the price increase I am seriously considering selling my armies.

Backfire wrote:
A very successful one, but certain aspects of the game were lost.

Not really. Those aspects only worked back in the days before the internet. You could kind of get away with overpowered "fun" cards because WOTC thought people would buy a few packs and that's it, and most people would never even know what all the cards in the game were. So you'd play your MTG games with your friends, and then you'd play a game on vacation one day and encounter this amazing powerful rare card you've never even seen before. Once the internet arrived and brought complete card lists, netdecking, and the ability to buy unlimited copies of every card you want with minimal effort, those old days were doomed. The choice was between tightening up the rules of the game and making it suitable for tournament play (and balanced casual play), or letting the game die.

And this isn't just speculation, it's a story that WOTC has told. They knew perfectly well that things like black lotuses were overpowered, but they were supposed to be balanced by rarity. The intent was that nobody would ever have more than one of them (if they were lucky enough to get even one), so the potential game-breaking decks couldn't exist outside of theory and speculation. And then once the game got popular beyond their expectations and the internet arrived they had to make a deliberate choice to give up on that balancing method and assume that people have unlimited copies of every card available and decklists of every powerful deck.

 amanita wrote:
@ Mr Morden - maybe you should read my response again. Looking for straw, man? I agree completely this edition sucks for competitive play; I merely said WHY it does and probably will continue to. I never addressed anything you wrote specifically, but I apparently hit a nerve. I never said people can't debate the merits of the game, I just have seen too many examples of people whitewashing its warts and saying stupid things like 'grow a pair or quit' which isn't useful in the least.

And yes I'm sick to death of people saying they play "for fun" like it's some higher morale ground when it's just code for not taking the game very seriously and mocking those who wish for something that requires more tactical involvement.

We agree: current WH 40K isn't it.

No nerve hit - read your own post and see how.it and this one are very judgemental - I didn't mock you or even try to defne what was fun - which apparently is a "bad thing?" Why should anyone take it seriously if they don;t want - same as why shouldnt you if you want to - its a game its not worth the anger..............

*sigh* I hear this more than I should. It isn't the end of competitive play guys. But I will concede it is VERY annoying even for a non competitive player like me.

@ Mr Morden - fair enough. My apologies if I came across as a heel.

I agree that the competitive side of 40K sucks. But that's a historical fact, as it has sucked for that since 2nd Edition. (Not counting Rogue Trader as it was meant to be more of an RPG).

But if two buddies are playing 40K, who are both fans of the setting and are playing just for the social enjoyment of playing a game in that setting, then it is perfectly fine, and always has been. Mostly because that type of setting always removes the flaws that make the game so lacking in the "fun" category. There is no spamming, no stretching badly written rules, and the meta goes out the window.

For instance, my next game with my buddy might be something like "Necrons versus Black Templars", without barely a glimmer of what everyone here keeps as the "winning meta". Or when my buddy fields Tau without even owning a model bought after 3rd edition.

40K is fun when you aren't trying to be exploitative of everything you can get away with. Too bad that's a ton of the players out there.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
40K is fun when you aren't trying to be exploitative of everything you can get away with. Too bad that's a ton of the players out there.

The thing I find even more bizarre than the fact that GW lack the professional pride to make their game better than it is, is the fact that so many players are so quick to blame other players for the game's dificiencies, rather than putting the blame where it belongs, squarely on GW's shoulders.

A player isn't having fun the wrong way if he chooses to write a list that you deem to be 'exploitative'. If he has a legal list, and that list happens to be ridiculously overpowered, that's not something he has done wrong for choosing to build the best list he can in a game that is about two armies fighting it out with the objective of one of them winning...

Deliberately handicapping yourself is fine it that's what you have chosen to do. But it's just rude to expect your opponent to do so.

No. The is gaming with the full intention of winning, and there's exploiting loopholes. The loopholes are GW's fault, but the rest is up to the players.

40K is at it's best when two players decide "the way that "x" is playable is stupidly written, and isn't fun. Y'know, let's agree to avoid "x" when we play so the game is more than just removing casualties."

Case in point, Escalation, and the decision by many players to ignore that it exists because they think it detracts from the game.

Deliberately handicapping yourself is fine it that's what you have chosen to do. But it's just rude to expect your opponent to do so.

And that's the crux between Competitive versus Friendly play. Friendly play is not the "the win". Things like spamming Riptides is all about the win, nothing more.

 Peregrine wrote:

Backfire wrote:
A very successful one, but certain aspects of the game were lost.

Not really. Those aspects only worked back in the days before the internet. You could kind of get away with overpowered "fun" cards because WOTC thought people would buy a few packs and that's it, and most people would never even know what all the cards in the game were.

This is not the full extent of it. When MtG was made into a competive game, they stopped designing cards with mechanics which broke the game. Take something like Chaos Orb. It had awesome rules for friendly play, but for cutthroat play of the competive Magic, it could not be accepted. It would cause far too many disputes and would be far too easy to abuse. So, despite Garfield stating that cards which "break the rules" being his favourite cards in the game, they no longer designed such cards, because they weren't suited for tournament format. The game become quicker to play with less room for disputes, but also more plain & boring.

And as I said earlier: MtG, despite all supposed "rigid playtesting" is just as unbalanced as 40k, if not more so. Every edition features dozens of cards which are nearly useless, and handful of cards which are totally awesome and everyone includes them. What happens is that some of the latter group get banned and/or restricted, so that people would play more of the former. But 40k playerbase is not used to something like that: most of them would be shocked if similar restrictions came around: "What do you mean I can only field one Riptide in my army list? The Codex and basic rulebook says I can have three! This is bs!"

 AegisGrimm wrote:
Things like spamming Riptides is all about the win, nothing more.

Really? So what if you like Riptides because of the fluff or model? I mean, it is the big centerpiece of the Tau army and it's supposed to inspire a "wow, I want that" reaction. I guess we're supposed to just pretend that nobody actually likes the stuff in powerful lists because it's more convenient to label them WAAC abusers?

 Zweischneid wrote:
Every RPG, LARP, etc.. has a similar rule to settle disputes. It's industry standard. Why should it be omitted, simply because GW adds miniatures to the mix?

The key difference here is that in most games that dispute resolution method is an absolute last resort. The rules are supposed to be clear enough that they don't need it, and usually it works that way. GW, on the other hand, uses "4+ it" as an excuse to skip the playtesting required to make rules that people actually understand.

 Zweischneid wrote:
There is no point in making Warhammer 40K "like other wargames" (because there already are other wargames) and there is no alternative to the current Warhammer-40K-take on gaming, because nobody else does it like Warhammer 40K

The point you keep missing is that the things that make 40k different from other wargames are, as a general rule, bad game design. It isn't a case of making a game that appeals to a certain group of players and is a good game for those players, it's a case of GW being unbelievably lazy and incompetent at writing rules and yelling about "beer and pretzels" as an excuse for why they shouldn't have to work harder. Fixing 40k's problems with competitive play would also make it a better game for everyone else at the same time. The only people who lose anything are the masochists who need to have bad rules so they can take their ridiculous moral high ground about how they must care more about "fun" than everyone else because they certainly don't play the game for its rules.

 Zweischneid wrote:
It emphasises narrative, storytelling and campaigns.

No, it emphasizes model sales, random tables as a substitute for good game design, and ignoring playtesting because most customers never actually play the game. Over and over again 40k's rules destroy the idea of narrative. Perfect example: random warlord traits. The warlord in an army is supposed to be the player avatar, and certainly the most important character in the story. But none of that story matters, you get a random roll on the table and who cares if it has anything to do with the narrative you've created. And then you have the absurd rules like barrage sniping. Is it really good storytelling that an artillery tank is the ultimate sniper rifle, while actual snipers struggle to hit the right target in a squad? Of course not, it's just bad game design and a refusal to spend the time required to get it right.

The only way that 40k emphasizes storytelling is if you make the absolutely insane assumption that "bad for competitive play" and "good for narrative play" are the exact same thing.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
40K is at it's best when two players decide "the way that "x" is playable is stupidly written, and isn't fun.

And my point was that this is an absurd state of affairs.

And that's the crux between Competitive versus Friendly play. Friendly play is not the "the win". .

For you, perhaps.

I've had gaming groups where we had a lot of fun just throwing whatever we had on the table. I've also had gaming groups where we had a lot of fun deliberately devising the most evil lists that we could. Sometimes they were the same groups.

Just because you don't find it fun to play to win doesn't mean that playing to win can't be fun. For a hell of a lot of players, playing to win is the entire point of a game with two sides.

Backfire wrote:
Take something like Chaos Orb. It had awesome rules for friendly play, but for cutthroat play of the competive Magic, it could not be accepted. It would cause far too many disputes and would be far too easy to abuse.

No, Chaos Orb was stupid game design right from day 1. Even in casual groups people pretty much immediately figured out how to break the game with it, and you had absurd situations like people taping their cards to the ceiling so the Chaos Orb couldn't land on them. It was pretty much guaranteed to cause endless arguments, and a game full of design like that probably wouldn't exist 20 years later like the real MTG does. Tournaments had very little impact here, the biggest factor was the realization that MTG had the potential to be way more than a casual time-waster between D&D sessions*. And for it to reach that potential some of the sillier elements would have to go.


*Fun fact: MTG was originally designed as a low-budget game that would get the funds to make WOTC's real project, a board game most people have never even heard of.

And as I said earlier: MtG, despite all supposed "rigid playtesting" is just as unbalanced as 40k, if not more so. Every edition features dozens of cards which are nearly useless, and handful of cards which are totally awesome and everyone includes them. What happens is that some of the latter group get banned and/or restricted, so that people would play more of the former. But 40k playerbase is not used to something like that: most of them would be shocked if similar restrictions came around: "What do you mean I can only field one Riptide in my army list? The Codex and basic rulebook says I can have three! This is bs!"

This is completely wrong.

Most of those "useless" cards aren't actually useless. Most cards in a set are designed for limited (sealed/draft) games, where you need a lot of basic commons that will never see play in constructed. And then there are a lot of cards that are aimed at "cool monster" players or the tinkerers who love finding ways to make weird and obscure stuff work. Those cards will tend to be low on power level, but they aren't aimed at the same purpose as the cards that are designed for competitive play so it doesn't matter. The problem here is your failure to understand the target audience, not balance.

And card bans are almost nonexistent. Very, very few cards ever get banned. They are the result of the occasional mistake or the game going in an unanticipated direction, not careless balancing that requires frequent bans to fix after release day.

Really? So what if you like Riptides because of the fluff or model? I mean, it is the big centerpiece of the Tau army and it's supposed to inspire a "wow, I want that" reaction. I guess we're supposed to just pretend that nobody actually likes the stuff in powerful lists because it's more convenient to label them WAAC abusers?

Including and spamming are two very different things.

Well what's really wrong with spamming units? I personally love the Riptide model and rules. Why shouldn't I be allowed to take three of them, with an allied third, the Commander Riptide, and a Riptide from the Formation? It's well within the rules to do so.

I would love to see a pole to determine how many dakka members prefer competitive play to beer and pretzels to campaigns. He is not trying to create a competitive game. They are trying to create a casual game where players buy models that look cool that have a game to go with them.

Actually yeah what is wrong with spamming? Having a lot of platoons seems rather fluffy for guardsman, tons of tanks is fluffy (more fluffy than half your regiment being guard and half tanks and air cav). What about DE? DE themed around speed of ships careening across the field. A drop pod oriented army based around scouts looking out, getting co-ordinates, sniping and then drop pods hammer down from the skies before releasing a flurry of shots. Battlesuit farsight army based around mobile forces? Not onl are these fluffy, but they aren't all super competitive so what is really wrong with spammy? (also by the nature if you try and build a TS or other faction it will seem rather spammy)


Automatically Appended Next Post:

rothrich wrote:
I would love to see a pole to determine how many dakka members prefer competitive play to beer and pretzels to campaigns. He is not trying to create a competitive game. They are trying to create a casual game where players buy models that look cool that have a game to go with them.

Honestly, the problem with this is that balanced rules are favorable to beer and pretzel gameplay. If I can take TS and know I'm not chopping an arm off for deploying them against another guy that is playing with pyrovores because he likes the fluff and models, if they are balanced we will have more fun because they will both have an equal chance of doing something.

Well, remember that if you bring anything that isn't a random hodge-podge of units, you're playing the game wrong and taking it way too serious.

I mean, its not like people have different ideas of what casual is, or what fluffy means, or what competitive is, or what constitutes spamming. There is only one undeniable definition all gamers must abide by in discussions like this.

What about talking about what kind of game both players are looking for and building lists in to make both armies for the predetermined game competitive with one another. In other words balanced.

rothrich wrote:
What about talking about what kind of game both players are looking for and building lists in to make both armies for the predetermined game competitive with one another. In other words balanced.

Well, yeah, no ones denying this.

The issue is that the game itself is flawed and the onus is on the players to self balance and police eachothers' lists, which is lazy writing at best.

rothrich wrote:
They are trying to create a casual game where players buy models that look cool that have a game to go with them.

This doesn't make any sense. The bad rules that encourage spamming and make those lists too powerful don't make 40k a better casual game, they just make it a bad game. The problem is 100% GW's complete laziness and incompetence at writing rules.

I think the rules make it fairly clear that that is the way the game is supposed to be with a way to play pickup games if there is no time to forge a narrative.

rothrich wrote:
no time to forge a narrative.

What does this even mean?

rothrich wrote:
I think the rules make it fairly clear that that is the way the game is supposed to be with a way to play pickup games if there is no time to forge a narrative.

That's just lazy design. GW says "play it casually and don't question us" as an excuse for publishing half-finished rules. The rules don't actually support "forging a narrative" very well, it just helps if you have something else to enjoy that can let you overlook all the game's many flaws.

 Blacksails wrote:

rothrich wrote:
no time to forge a narrative.

What does this even mean?

I think he means its to play as a pick up game if you cant set up a special scenario or campaign.

Am I the only one who thinks that "Forging a narrative" is an empty buzzphrase that basically means "You cant enjoy the actual game but you can pretend that something cool is going on!"?

 TheCustomLime wrote:


Am I the only one who thinks that "Forging a narrative" is an empty buzzphrase that basically means "You cant enjoy the actual game but you can pretend that something cool is going on!"?

There are people who think it isn't an empty buzz phrase?