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If mission three was a surprise, I would understand people being upset with it. It was published prior to the event though, and people had opportunities to change their lists, or their strategies, to account for it beforehand.

In my opinion, any tournament that announces the missions prior to the event, and has interesting changes is a good skill tester. It gives people the opportunity to think around the new parameters and rewards those who do, while penalizing people who do the same old thing every single time.

Augustus wrote:
... or had a timed chess tournament where the queen moved 3 squares max on the black side and like a night on the white side. That's what tripple KP conditions are.

You know, Bobby Fisher came up with a game called Chess960 or Fisher Random Chess, because he felt that traditional chess was too focused on memorizing openings, and didn't reward creative play and original thought enough. There are a decent number of fans of the game.

So this here tournament changed some mission structures to make a more interesting game. They announced this ahead of time. Anyone who attended knew what they were getting into, and despite Danny's assertion to the contrary, a week is more than enough time for anyone to reconfigure, or even make a completely new army if they didn't like how their army would have fared in the tournament. (As proof of this statement, I offer the fact that I not only built, but painted, to award-winning standards, 5500 points of daemons in a week last year. Simply assembling models takes far less effort)

So, you had three options. A) go with your traditional army, knowing what was coming. B) change armies, knowing what was coming, or C) stay home.

People had the opportunity to make educated decisions about which option they would take. Yes, they weren't "by the book" missions, but they made for a more balanced tournament overall. Really, is that a bad thing?

Danny Internets wrote:Your argument is ridiculous.

You're ridiculous. It doesn't matter what the topic, you're always crying about something. My argument, which you seem to have missed entirely in your quest to condescend towards everyone else, is not that people should have rebuilt their armies, but, rather, that doing so was entirely possible, if that was an avenue they wanted to pursue. My argument is that people who went to 'ard boyz knew what they were getting into, and made their decision fully aware of what the missions were to be. No one was forced to attend, and no one who attended was forced to play with a mech army that would auto-lose mission 3.

Much like in the threads about GWs prices, people are unwilling to take the steps necessary to show their displeasure with the choices presented to them. People would rather go to 'ard boyz and complain about the missions that were announced well ahead of time, than stay home and show GW that this is not what they want.

Danny Internets wrote:
Tsk tsk. Ad hominem attacks? Please address your criticisms to my argument, not my person.

You're so quick to point out fancy latin terms when it benefits you, but you're more than willing to present a strawman in place of my actual argument. If you want to babble about fallacies, I'm sure we can go on. Otherwise, try addressing your criticisms to my actual argument, and not some tangent about whether people should be expected to rework their armies.

Let me be very clear about this:

Premise 1: 'ard boyz missions were available before the event
Premise 2: people who attended 'ard boyz had the opportunity to adjust their lists prior to the event, knowing the missions
Premise 3: people had the option to stay home and boycott the event if they felt the missions were unfair
Conclusion: People who went to the 'ard boyz event went with full knowledge of what they were getting into, representing an implied acceptance of the missions.

Your statement, "I once wrote a 26 page research paper with over 100 references in 48 hours for a masters level neuroscience course. Does that mean 48 hours is a reasonable amount of time for people to be expected to complete that amount of work? Your argument is ridiculous." does not address any part of my argument, yet you call my argument ridiculous.

I can only assume you're referring to my second premise, but the fact that you can write a research paper has nothing to do with whether or not it is possible to adjust your list prior to the 'ard boyz event. I think a week is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to acquire and assemble 2500 points of models - even working a full-time job. It's certainly more than possible. Next-day shipping leaves a person 20 hours for construction if they dedicate just four hours a night to the task; that should be more than adequate. Whether the financial burden is worth the chance to win that 3rd mission is a matter of personal choice, but certainly no more so than choosing which army to build in the first place, some armies are intrinsically more expensive than others. Furthermore, that's only the extreme case, where someone feels the need to completely bail on the army they have chosen. More realistically, people should be expected to make minor tweaks with knowledge of the missions. I saw one poster's battle reports who was playing a Tau army, and had blacksun filters scattered throughout his list - wasted points in a tournament where you know there are no nightfight games. And that's a change that would not have involved changing any models.

However, even if I concede premise two (which I don't), my conclusion is still correct - and you still haven't addressed it. The fact that people can choose not to attend, after seeing the missions, does mean that by attending, they're giving their implied acceptance of the missions. Augustus has the right of it - he saw the missions, thought they were dumb, and stayed home. Good for him. If more people acted in this fashion rather than complaining on the internet, maybe GW would start to really learn what we like and dislike. But, as is, they'll see attendance figures, and guess that they got it right.

sennacherib wrote:I like Victory points way more than i like KP. While KP are faster and eaier to figure out, VP give a more complete tally of the damage you inflict on your foe.

But KP aren't about measuring damage inflicted, they're about presenting a counterpoint to the benefits that MSU tactics inherently have. It's why this is a game, not a simulation.

If 5th ed used VP as the default, rather than KP, then there would be no reason not to take more smaller units than fewer large ones. Why take a unit of 2 landspeeders, when you can have two units of one each? They're stronger (not lost to immobilizes), can target more things, can contest more objectives, and require your opponent to shoot with at least two units to destroy them. VP makes this choice a no-brainers. KP makes this choice interesting.

I think that 5e overly rewards mech/mobile armies (compared to more massive armies) too much, and as such has removed another interesting aspect of the game.

In 4th ed, the alternate deployment style was Escalation, which hurt mobile armies and rewarded footsloggers. In 5th ed, Dawn of War rewards mobile armies and hurts foot sloggers. In 4th ed, of the 5 book missions, two (recon and loot counters) rewarded the more mobile army, but two (Take & Hold and Straight VP) were more to the benefit of the larger, less mobile force. (The third, cleanse, is probably a wash, maybe a little advantageous to the mobile player). In 5th ed, 2/3rds of the missions benefit the more mobile player.

These changes, along with the general decrease in price of transports, plus the increase in survivability of the same, have really removed much of the play/counter-play that was found in matching up a slower, larger army against a smaller faster one. Now, the armies that used to operate better as static forces (marines, guard) are all running mobile forces. The armies that can't (necrons, and to a lesser extent nids) are rarely seen.

Mobility gives you the ability to pick the battles of your choosing - that's an advantage in of itself, and really needs to be priced as such. 5th ed has taken that inherent advantage and rewarded it with superior durability and lower costs as well. It's no wonder that you don't see many foot armies in 5th ed. In 4th, the rhino cost you three men, and added a risk. In 5th, it costs you barely two men, and is not only more durable, but safer for the men as well.

I think it is a design failure that has led to everyone having to follow this same trend. And, I think that M3 was a good response to that. I think that the overall mass versus mobility question (and how to tackle it) is one of the most interesting questions in wargames, and I feel that 5th ed has neutered mass armies and buffed mobile armies so much that it's just not a factor anymore. I personally think that's a shame.

Danny Internets wrote:
Orks are a mediocre army and foot Orks represent the most mediocre build that codex can put out. It's a point-and-click list that gets man-handled by good armies in the standard scenarios. If you really want to know how
I feel about the codex read this:

http://www.baldandscreaming.com/commentary/greenskins-versus-meta-game-are-orks-competitive/

The whole article is written in the style of "ignore any data you might see that opposes my view, because that data must obviously be a result of bad opponents". That's how Stelek argued too. It sets you up in a nice defensive position. Anyone shows you data, and you simply wave your hand saying "bad opponent", while continuing to preach from your ivory tower. Come down from the land of ideal opponents and perfect stats and play some games in the real world.

Claiming that orks can only win against uncompetitive armies, or against poor players, is clearly erroneous. They keep performing well at GTs, even when the scenarios aren't designed like S3 at 'ard boyz. Surely not all other players at these GTs are bad players.

Saying that footslogging orks are a point-and-click list is another way of simply not wanting to acknowledge that there are skills involved in knowing how to play the army. It's like me saying that IG or Mech Wolves are point-and-click armies, because the only real skills needed to play them are a good grasp of target priority. That's not true, and it's this sort of mentality that separates the good IG player from the mediocre IG player.

Orks are a lot less forgiving than either Wolves or IG. If anything, it takes more skill to play foot orks well than either SW or IG. If SW get out of position, they've still got a 3+ save. If they accidentally misjudge a range and get charged, they've got counter-assault. An ork army that finds itself out of position dies, quickly. An ork army that lets itself gets charged is in a world of trouble with CR.

But maybe that's what you mean. When you say foot orks are a weak list, what you're really saying is it takes a better player to win with them.

I think this line from the article sums up that up too:

(I still have trouble with Charlie's army, but I chalk that up to him being a good player).

Maybe all the orks that "gets man-handled by good armies" are played by the same average players as the SW and IG lists that get beat by orks are played by. Maybe, the player is more important than the list.

Danny Internets wrote:
Do you people actually read things before slamming out responses on your keyboards?

Yes. Perhaps the problem isn't so much reading comprehension of any individual post, but rather, that we read your other posts and draw inferences from them about what you're trying to say without worrying about your plausible deniability that you seem to work in.

What I mean by this is that you say in various posts things like,

... the vast majority of which brought armies totally unsuited for competitive play

And then you say,

... I said they are mediocre, and, in fact, slightly less so due to the ruling on Deffrollas...

Now, this is where the rest of us start making connections. You clearly believe in competitive play. To play competitively, one needs to field a competitive army. You make claims about how many people who go to tournaments field armies unsuited for competitive play. And then you say that orks are mediocre. Mediocre might != bad, but mediocre also != competitive. So, when you say orks are mediocre, what the rest of us get from that is that you don't believe they're competitive, and as such go into the bucket of armies unsuited for competitive play. If they're not suited for competitive play, then from a tournament perspective, they do suck - they're not competitive in an environment that requires such.

You see how this all works together. From a competitive perspective, you're either competitive, or your not, and calling something mediocre implies that it is not competitive and therefore sucks for use in tournaments.

So is it any wonder that when we all see that orks do well in tournaments, we wonder how they can be considered mediocre, and therefore unsuitable for competitive play.

In my experience, playing in tournaments, against the lists you mentioned that I've played against (mech ig, semi-mech ig, speed marines, mech vulkan, and maximum overdrive (???? - if that's massed space wolf razorbacks, then I played it with my orks, if not, I have no idea what maximum overdrive is), I've beat them almost every time. I ended up with one draw against a mech-guard army that was able to contest an objective a full 38 inches from its initial position (really lucky on both the drop-line scatter for his vendetta team and then also his run move), which would have been a win apart from that one insane move.

I played mech-guard at Adepticon, and at the last AWC tournament. I've played many games against my friend's semi-mech guard. I played razorback spam wolves at Adepticon, as well as TWC wolves, and biker marines. I don't see a lot of Vulkan, but I did face off against him in a tournament maybe six months ago?

So, either I'm a good enough player that I can beat the lists that supposedly crush orks - probably because they're always played by bad players (in spite of these bad player's finishes in the tournaments), or somehow your theory and my reality just don't intersect. I don't know what else to say. Your position is unassailable, because whenever anyone presents any evidence, you have a reason that it shouldn't count.

I've never played against immolator spam - I think it's a fairly rare list. I do not doubt that it can own orks though...

mech vulkan. Sounds like you play a marine army with vulkan in a tank

Considering that the 1st place team was also an all-ork team, with a completely different build, and you have to figure that either everyone is only playing lousy players, or maybe the codex does have some teeth, even in a metagame where 30% of the armies were mech-guard and 30% were space wolves.

I might be able to find some time. My schedule is kind of hurry-up-and-wait at the moment, I've got some really painful house repairs that need doing, but juggling the schedules of the contractors is being tricky. I can probably work something out though. PM me if you've got a specific time in mind.

Fearspect wrote:Disagree with me all you like, when you make up rules and change the army structure, you are no longer playing 40k and all the previous balances go right out the window.

So in your mind, any tournament that uses any missions not from the main rulebook is not a "40k tournament". Any tournament that uses the very popular Primary/Secondary/Tertiary objective system is not a "40k tournament". Any tournament held at a venue with defined house rules of any sort are not "40k tournaments".

Your idea of a "40k tournament" is getting matched up with an opponent, and then dicing off for the mission and deployment type that you'll play (as instructed to do in the rulebook)?

Augustus wrote:
Interesting, collectively, I see your point, collectively the 1st match was harder than the last. taken to another level this makes matchup even worse, as in those who played mech v mech in R 3 were likely playing an even game while those who played foot v foot in game 1 were likewise equally penalized. So pairing becomes key then...

Has this ever not been the case? Matchups in specific missions has always been a huge factor in tournament play.

A couple of years ago, I got the random luck to play Bill Kim in round one of the Adepticon Gladiator and we knocked each other out of the running. If either of us had a different first-round opponent, who knows what would happen. The next year, I was running a mech-eldar list (at the tail-end of 4th, when they were insane with clown wagons), and going into round three, I was somewhere on the top tables, and got matched up with the necron destroyer list that was about as perfect a scissors to the eldar's paper as you could get. It was the only necron list on the top five tables, and looking over the others, I had a shot to win the event if I'd been paired against any of the others.

These things happen. And, they're why 40k simply isn't designed for determining things like who the absolute best player is.

I've seen these things happen time and again. I've been on the winning side of playing against a green tide list with a shooty army and a corner deployment, and I've been on the losing side of missions that rewarded a player with a HtH HQ over a support HQ when I fielded a near-naked inquisitor. That doesn't mean I'm a good player one day and a lousy one the next.

That's why "competitive 40k" is such a misnomer, and why tournaments should be considered an opportunity to get together with friends (or at least acquaintances) and play a few games over a day or two, rather than as something that needs to be addressed with the utter ruthlessness seen in the competitive lists espoused by Danny, Stelek, and their ilk. Because at some point, you're going to benefit from a mission at the right time, and at some point, you're going to get hammered by the mission/matchup nightmare that is simply beyond your control, that you have no answer for.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

Hulksmash wrote:My only issue with the Nova Open is the removal of KP's which MVB and I have talked about. I'm just not a huge fan removing one of the main victory conditions that the rule book gives us but it's their event and I'm still gonna attend if I can. That being said it could easily be pointed out that it isn't a competitive event because it removes one of the key victory conditions given to us by GW.

Not only isn't it a competitive event, it's not even a 40k event, according to some of the other posters here. Rules change!!