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Why is there so much hate for kids these days , i find that there is a massive sterotype going around. That all kids are WAAC player and that they all play smurfs hey i am 13 and i hate smurfs(and all sm for that matter except csm). and that they all quit all the time. i play an arguably 3 tier army tau i lose a lot i am fine with it i am generaly well liked. Please tell me felllow wargamers why is there all this hate for kids? please share bad experiences of games you have had with 1-15 year olds.

pops101 wrote:Why is there so much hate for kids these days , i find that there is a massive sterotype going around. That all kids are WAAC player and that they all play smurfs hey i am 13 and i hate smurfs(and all sm for that matter except csm). and that they all quit all the time. i play an arbualy 3 tier army tau i lose a lot i am fine with it i am generaly well liked. Please tell me felllow wargamers why is there all this hate for kids? please share bad experiences of games you have had with 1-15 year olds.

Personally I've never had any hate for the younger players...some have been annoying, especially when they obviously have no interest in the rules. I think it's great to get anyone that young into a hobby where they can use their hands and mental faculties. However, I think if there is any 'hate' towards the youngins it's because of their lack of dedication to learning the rules, painting etc. Now that's a generalization and nothing more since I really don't have to deal with it myself.

pops101 wrote: i play an arbualy 3 tier army tau i lose a lot i am fine with it i am generaly well liked.

Kids are fine, but there are times when their gaming acumen turns into the equivalent of the quote above. That can make any activity unpleasant.

40K has nothing to do with it. I just hate kids. Hell, I hate almost everyone. No need to discriminate against the younger ones, older people can be just as dumb.

Mattlov wrote:40K has nothing to do with it. I just hate kids. Hell, I hate almost everyone. No need to discriminate against the younger ones, older people can be just as dumb.

QFT.

I just hate kids. The fact that you play 40k has nothing to do with it.

OP you sound EXACTLY like me at 13. Tau had just come out & I played them. I lost a lot but had fun & seemed well liked. Remember this post in 5-6 years & you'll see why there's so much hate. I'll list a few issues I have & I am fully aware I was probably guilty of most if not all of these at 13.

"You" refers to people between the ages of 11 (youngest I've played) and 16
You tend not to know the rules too well.
You tend to measure wrong.
You tend to get distracted easily (It's fine if you bring your friend to show him/her the game but remember when you are in a game, pay attention to the game)
You tend not to paint your models (I'm rather slow / poorly skilled at painting but I do periodically stop buying models until I have everything painted up)
You get caught cheating more (Intentional or not I see younger people "accidentally" pick up failures more than older people)
You aren't very good and It's not too fun when I know I can steamroll you by turn 2 (there ARE exceptions such as a local 12 year old who surprises everyone with his tactical genius, I mean hell he may be the great great great. . . . . great Grandfather of CCCCCCRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDDD) - Sorry couldn't resist

That said I'm sure at 19 the older guys think I'm a punk too, I can get a bit cocky & competitive at times & occasionally make rash decisions that bite me in the arse. So please don't take any of that as a personal attack just trends I have observed. Also no one is perfect and each age group tends to have their own quirks. My best advice is if you enjoy the hobby stay in it, It's just a game & the most important rule is to have fun.

I play with 1 year olds all the time....

the kids at my local GW annoy the piss out of me....I mean, I was playing at 10-11, and I was kind of like them...but young kids nowadays are so much more spastic and act SO MUCH MORE like smartasses, because of the interwebs and the alleged knowledge that they have obtained on it. I am 23, but most of the guys I play with think I am almost 30...(part of it is my attitude, part is my receding hairline, and part of it is that I listen to jazz while I paint and play...ha ha)

Shas'O Dorian wrote:OP you sound EXACTLY like me at 13. Tau had just come out & I played them. I lost a lot but had fun & seemed well liked. Remember this post in 5-6 years & you'll see why there's so much hate. I'll list a few issues I have & I am fully aware I was probably guilty of most if not all of these at 13.

"You" refers to people between the ages of 11 (youngest I've played) and 16
You tend not to know the rules too well.
You tend to measure wrong.
You tend to get distracted easily (It's fine if you bring your friend to show him/her the game but remember when you are in a game, pay attention to the game)
You tend not to paint your models (I'm rather slow / poorly skilled at painting but I do periodically stop buying models until I have everything painted up)
You get caught cheating more (Intentional or not I see younger people "accidentally" pick up failures more than older people)
You aren't very good and It's not too fun when I know I can steamroll you by turn 2 (there ARE exceptions such as a local 12 year old who surprises everyone with his tactical genius, I mean hell he may be the great great great. . . . . great Grandfather of CCCCCCRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDDD) - Sorry couldn't resist

That said I'm sure at 19 the older guys think I'm a punk too, I can get a bit cocky & competitive at times & occasionally make rash decisions that bite me in the arse. So please don't take any of that as a personal attack just trends I have observed. Also no one is perfect and each age group tends to have their own quirks. My best advice is if you enjoy the hobby stay in it, It's just a game & the most important rule is to have fun.

I started at 13.
Within 3 months I baught the 40k rulebook.
within 3 hours of that i read it cover to cover.
Within 2 weeks of that i became an encyclopedia for 4ed.
Some of us bothered to read the rules.
And I am a competant general.

The kids that come along to my local GW are, at times, a royal pain in the ass. Bear in mind that I am primarily painting my army at the moment, so haven't played against any of them. I find that they

- Never buy their own hobby supplies and are constantly pestering you to use yours.

- Have such a short attention span when it comes to painting that they'll do things ass-backwards or not at all (one kid wanted to borrow a shop paint to paint an arm of his Lictor that was neither undercoated not even assembled).

- Constantly jabber on about the most menial, banal things.

- Will not listen or take advice (especially when it comes to painting tips).

- Are just generally exceptionally irritating; asking stupid, pointless questions constantly etc.

There's a reason there is an age limit on this game. Parents should realise this before shelling out on stuff that their sprog is pestering them for.

L. Wrex

90% of kids are irritating, cheating, bad-mannered, shrill-voiced little bastards. The other 10% are fine, and you might belong to that 10%, but most adults aren't going to play against kids if 9 out of 10 games are with the former.

Hang on there is another tread just like this ill put up the link.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/261164.page

All you need to know.

I certainly don’t hate kids, but I do have reservations about playing against younger opponents for several reasons…

1. Younger opponents have a tendency to have diminished reading comprehension skills which correlates directly to a diminished understanding of the rules and the codex they are using.

2. Younger opponents tend to view their models as “toys” which correlates to a diminished respect for their own and my models. This significantly enhances the chances of having a model mishandled.

3. Younger opponents tend to be less skilled which results in a game that is not challenging to me.

And, from a less generalized perspective, I’ve experienced young players who either through lack of math skills or deliberate intent pad their army lists with a hundred or so extra points (this happened in a recent tournament but fortunately I was able to catch the mistake before tournament began). I’ve also experienced a younger player get to round three in a game only to have his parent demand that he pack up his models and leave.

There are certainly exceptions to the tendencies I’ve noticed above, and a younger player who carries himself in a way that does not exhibit those tendencies is a welcome opponent any time – just as an older player who does exhibit those tendencies is an unwelcome opponent.

I sometimes play with my 2 year old son. He just moves my gaunts around like action figures, but i can tell that by the time he's 7 or 8 he'll be able to start getting a grasp of the rules. *edit* In fact he already can name every model in my Tyranid army (gaunt, stealer, tyrant, carnifex, trygon, tervigon, etc). I was very impressed. *end edit*

I wish my dad had been a gamer, LOL, I'd have had way cooler toys growing up.

I'm 12. I know the Black Book by heart. 60% of my army isn't painted. I'm a slow painter and have school, but what parts of my army are painted, are painted to an acceptable standard!
Us kids can be ok, but when little f*cks come to the local GW store, use the stores rhino, tape a Red Bull covered straw to said rhino, claim it is a 'Super-Canon' and chuck the model at the ground as hard as possible when told they can't do that, that is when kids suck.

Mattlov wrote:40K has nothing to do with it. I just hate kids. Hell, I hate almost everyone. No need to discriminate against the younger ones, older people can be just as dumb.

Yep, there it is.

All the redshirts (or blackshirts, as they are in WA) in my local store like me, and not just for money, as do other casual gamers. This probably has something with my lack of history commiting the afore mentioned crime of sticking a Redbull straw to a Rhino.

kids can be annoying and they can be alright.

there are 3 kids at my group.

1 is our first and only TFG. no fun to play, extreamly cocky, clumsy, easy to beat, doesn't listen to advice(even when he begs our eldar champion for it) foul mouthed as a chicago gangster. he isn't a bad painter though(amazingly)


the other 2 (brothers) are attentive, always listen to advice(most goes over their head, but at least they listen) read the rules book, know their codex pretty well, paint fairly well. Their dad and mom both play as well so that might help with their behavior.

I don't know if I can answer completely unbiased because I am a former kid. Excluding the fact that I once was one kids are little s**ts and can't be trusted, I mean honestly there are here to replace us and steal our jobs when we get old.

I only picked the game up again when I was twenty, so no real experience of being 'that kid'. There were a group of boys at my school who played, and I tended to be the occasional umpire; 'yes that dice is crooked, no you can't count it, stop being a sook Tom and let your general have his dramatic death already' type stuff. And painted horses when I was bored. There was never any major behaviour of the listed kinds.

Granted, that was probably because the deputy headmaster, who was in charge of detentions and other disciplinary matters, has a rather nice IG army he's very competent at and there was only one real group of players in the area...

I started wargaming when I was about 7 years old. As a result, I was a pretty competent gamer when I was 13. I understand that most kids that age don't have that much experience though, and often need to learn a lot about sportsmanship and the like. I used to play in a group, and there was one kid only about 2-3 years younger than me (so he was 13 or 14 when I started going) but he had the absolute worst attention span imaginable, no knowledge of the rules, was easy to beat, and painted his army really, really slowly. He is who I think about when "kids in gaming" are mentioned. Not a bad person by any means, but there's enough annoying tendencies to make playing against them a bit of a chore.

If I had kids, I'd make sure they'd have played plenty of games with myself and their friends before I took them out to a gaming group or FLGS.

I think if you are a compatant gamer then people won't call you a kid.

they will call you a younger gamer.

"kid" has negative connotations in the gaming community. yound gamer or "noob" doesn't

"noob" implies you just don't know all the rules yet and thats fine.

"kidding around" is not ok, especially around/with your opponents landraider they just spent 2 weeks laboriously painting to very high standards(thank goodness i was there to protect it)

DarkHound wrote:

Mattlov wrote:40K has nothing to do with it. I just hate kids. Hell, I hate almost everyone. No need to discriminate against the younger ones, older people can be just as dumb.

QFT.

QFT +1

Seriously. It's not just kids.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Grey Templar wrote:I think if you are a compatant gamer then people won't call you a kid.

they will call you a younger gamer.

"kid" has negative connotations in the gaming community. yound gamer or "noob" doesn't

"noob" implies you just don't know all the rules yet and thats fine.

"kidding around" is not ok, especially around/with your opponents landraider they just spent 2 weeks laboriously painting to very high standards(thank goodness i was there to protect it)

Sir, I take offense at this. "noob" is most certainly a derogatory term. The term you are thinking of is Newbie.

And now for a public service announcement:
http://www.cad-comic.com/comics/cad/20060823.jpg <--PG13

@Gwar:
CAD sucks.

@OP
The problem for me lies in the attitudes of the kids in the shop. When I was thirteen, I was at home reading over the rules and learning to paint. I played mostly against my peers for 3rd Edition.
The kids in the shop will walk up in the middle of a game, start asking me about how I painted my Fists (no specific questions, just "How did you make them look so good?") from there, they start talking about their army, how it isn't painted but it could still kick my ass. If I respond, it turns into hypothetical war games, so I generally just nod.

I quite enjoy having others of any age watch my games, and if a kid wants to ask about my army or my tactics, I'm glad to explain as I play, but the conversation has to stay rooted in the game, otherwise I can discuss that later.

I have to disagree with Shas'O Dorian. I think I'm generally accepted at the shop as an adult, even though I'm 19. Maybe its the facial hair or going out of my way to have a fair game, but I tend to be treated by adults as peers.
This could also be because of our shop's high population of kids, thus making any mature individual look like an adult.

I think it comes to what you expect from the game. If 'the kid' is innattentive at best, then you just put up with it, at least he's trying. At worst its just a waste of your time because you wont get an enjoyable experience from the time you invest in having a game, may end up with broken models, rules arguements about the dumbest of things, broken figs, and so on. I grew up a gamer and painted my first fig when I was around 6 years old, played my first battletech in Jr. High... so yeah there's a head-start for some, but that is not the norm. To tell you the truth I was probably far more of a challenge when I was 13 years old than I am now (being older and discovering that beer and girls are fun makes you care a bit less about being a master tactician). I think kids should play with their peers, in their own way, while 'grown-ups' (ha!) should play with other like minded, more 'serious' gamers (HA!) in their own way. This way everybody is happy.

ok first of all i look like i am 10 but then, once you get to know me people generally realize that i am 13 and i am more accepted into the gaming group (they can swear and talk about sex around me). I know my codex really well probobly am one of the top 15 best fluff masters at the group. I know the rules head to toe i ocaisinally screw up but hey who does not. and i am an avid painter i ran out of stuff to paint

As I said, there are exceptions.

I think it doesn't really have so much to do with age but with experience. When we grew up playing games, it was a bunch of Jr. High age dorks goofing around in basements all learning to play together and figuring out how to master the game. That's a great way to learn a game. House-rules galore and 'counts as' models and so on. That's fine for kids just wanting to play a game. The moment it becomes competative though, is where the bar gets higher. People take their 40k tournaments as seriously as Olympic contestants take theirs just as an example (probably waste EVEN MORE time on it than Olympians do practicing when you take into account all the master painting and number crunching that goes into being a killer 40k player). Nobody puts a 13 yr old into a grecco-roman wrestling bout against a 28 yr old either. I think that is why kids are generally shunned by grownups.... but from the contrary viewpoint.. . back in the day when I first found rogue trader I WAS A KID... but so was everyone else. The hobby hadn't skyrocketed into the competative realm that it is today it was just another afternoon with your friends playing some dumb game. Next day it might have been axis-n-allies, or dungeons-n-dragons. Imagination stirred in us as children and we PLAYED. As adults, we COMPETE. The playfulness is lost in trying to be awesome with the most efficient army build and maneuver logic we can, to see if we can outthink the other guy (I always thought warhammer as chess for pussies who need dice to blame) and therefore feel like our 'win' is worth something in whatever local store league or tournament setting. That is not a fun setting for kids to be in.

Morgrim wrote:I only picked the game up again when I was twenty, so no real experience of being 'that kid'.

Similar to me. Only I was 19. Just.

I never had to deal with the "little gamer kid" issues (like peer pressure at playing 40kays at school - hell, I used to laugh at the nerds who played D&D - still do, actually).

Some kids are alright. Many are not. The many colour our views of the remainder.

I dont really game as such so really my only 40k community experience is dakka where my age isnt obivous (16 by the way) so I have never really experienced any age discrimination and now im not exactly a "kid" I doubt I ever will.

Grrr, I hate kids, walkin' on my lawn... breathin' my air... I swear if one more kid walks on my lawn I'm gettin' the hose... wait... Martha! turn on the hose! What?!... No! You've already seen that episode of Mattlock!... just turn on the hose!! Grrr... nevermind.

Seriously though, I don't mind playing against younger guys at all, it really just depends on the player. If they know the rules, have a decent attention span, and aren't incredibly annoying, then I'm happy to play no matter the age. I'd rather get a game in with a kid than some older smelly guy. As far as the WAAC aspect, I prefer to have competitive games anyway, so that doesn't bother me either.

Stereotypes exist for a reason. It's a fact that most children are stupid/ignorant/ADD/obnoxious. What's worse, it's even more likely that they downright suck at the game. I have little time to play as it is, so when I hit the tables I want a challenge, not to tutor some imbecile as he takes 90 minutes to get through one turn.

It's just a sad reality of this hobby. Just like the reality that the vast majority of gamers are fat and don't shower often enough.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Grey Templar wrote:
"noob" implies you just don't know all the rules yet and thats fine.

That's an incorrect term. The word you're thinking of is "newb", or someone who doesn't yet know all the rules but is learning. We were all newbs at one point or another, and this term is generally not an insult.

A n00b thinks he knows everything, but really knows nothing. They never learn, never listen to advice, cheat, use cheap loopholes, and generally wallow in their ignorance.