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catbarf, this angry nerd must've put on one hell of a Karen I bet tho, to get them to concede his Mortarion. I'd pay a couple dollars to see this if anyone got it on tape..

LoWs aren't a problem so the initial rule you created was stupid to begin with.

Slayer-Fan I think they really wanted to ban pieces like Mortarion(ironically in particular), possibly too pieces like Guillaman and Greater demons of Slanesh could be very de-moralizing vs newer players

bat702 wrote:
Slayer-Fan I think they really wanted to ban pieces like Mortarion(ironically in particular), possibly too pieces like Guillaman and Greater demons of Slanesh could be very de-moralizing vs newer players

The only thing you can do to demoralize new players is to tell them they can't potentially use parts of their collection.

He said they started at 250 points and moved up. Obviously LoWs had to be banned for at least some portion of that. You can't let people take Morty in 500 or 750 or even 1000 point games, it doesn't work, the games are over before they even start based on what the lists look like (which is a problem with 40k at low points values period, but it's made exponentially worse by certain types of models).

It sounds like they didn't have a clear plan for what to do once they got to higher points values, which was a mistake of organization. It should have been clear from the start whether LoWs were banned, period, or whether they were allowed starting at say 1500 points but not before, or whatever else.

The rules, whatever they may be, once set should be adhered to.
MTG players should certainly be able to understand this concept, what with all their different formats.

The moment it turned into a tourney though, especially with $$$ prizes, I'd walk away. I play minis games for fun, not as work. If I'm playing for $, it's work.

The idea of basing the prizes on how much someone spent is just {a bunch of now politically incorrect terms}.

An opinion, by its very nature cannot be anything BUT biased.

 catbarf wrote:
A $600 prize will turn most any hobby league into a tournament. I mean, that's a competitive incentive- if the person who came up with it is surprised that people then play competitively, I'd question their thought process.

So given that this is, effectively, a competitive tournament, bending the rules for one player was the wrong call for sure. You don't change the rules halfway through.

Anyways- IMO, if you want a friendly play group, don't use prizes. Or at the very least, don't use prizes with monetary value.

THIS.
SO
MUCH


If i put 600$ in a price pool for learners and most of them know how to use the interwebs you for certain will get NOT a chill playerbase for the future.

Seems like tournament for noobs at my old store, aside for the 600$ cash prize. We had more like 200$ in store credit. Same thing including the store owners sons being in top 3 prize recipient in every event, and people buying pre build lists just to get a chance at the top prize.
Even the rule changes mid event seem to be the same. Although in our case this was more of a 6th week of event, suddenly we fight durning an earthquake event, which gives huge buff to jetbike, flyer and skimer armies and hits infantry based armies really hard.

yukishiro1 wrote:


I'm not interested in vilifying MTG or anything, I don't think it's particularly worse than most other gaming scenes. Just pointing out that the hobbyist element of wargaming tends to produce more friendly communities than those based around games that don't have a hobby element.

I think you're generalising, probably without realising. Plenty folks who play ttgs have next to zero interest in the hobby side, or even the lore side. It's a game, first and last and only, and a game is about winning. The hobbyist element can be wonderful, and also, at its worst, can also be notoriously smug, sneering elitist and condescending- google 'rivet counters' or 'button polishers' or the more extreme views expressed in the 'would you play an unpainted army' threads.

I do think its fair to say there are different cultures in different games (warmachine is a notably competitive crowd, warhammer has significant 'beer and pretzel' elements), cultures/scenes (garage scene would arguable be more relaxed than store/club) and Country (Americans get a reputation for being a lot more competitive/adhering to PUGs and treating their own communities as npcs). As ever, this csn be true, half true, sometimes accurate, unflattering, wrong or downright harmful. Also note these are gradients, not a fine line and there will be exceptions.

At the end of the day some gamers regardless of source will be wonderful, and some will be downright awful.

The biggest problems with this league in order:

1. Prize money on the line
2. Going back on the no LoW rule mid-league
3. Prize money on the line
4. Prize money on the line

If you're running an escalation league to try to bring in new players, adding a significant amount of prize money to it seems like the worst possible way to encourage people to have fun and explore the system which sounds like it was brand new to many of them. The really depressing thing is it sounded like the league worked well at the start and successfully got a bunch of new players involved in the game.

I think the problem lays more with the store management than anything else. They caved to a player's demand to break the established rules and don't seem to have a problem with staff playing for the prize money. In this case the whole thing might just be doomed because it seems like the management are clueless. What would have been better is bringing the league to a close and then running a new tournament or set of tournaments for the participants (and anyone else who wants to play). At least then the parameters of the competition are clear throughout.

I'm going to break from a lot of people here and say that problem was your community, not theirs. That said, your store also needs to accept some responsibility as well, but he needs to apologize to YOU, not to them. It comes down to different strokes for different folks. Let's face it; big models are COOL! The last thing you want to hear as a new player is that you're "not allowed" to do something that is totally allowable, regardless of whether you come from Warhammer, Magic, or Formula 1 racing.

This new growth in your community wants to play with the big toys. Your community may consider them OP or not intended for play, but there's an opportunity to grow here. You're the vets, they're the newbs. You're going to crush them no matter what they bring, so if you're bringing new players into the community, you should let THEM pick the level of competition they want to engage at. Since they're coming over from being vets in another game system, even better! They know they will get crushed until they learn the ropes; it happens to them every time in their current game as well. They probably want that thrill with 40k as well, and you can happily oblige them.


That all said; your store owner absolutely needs to learn to put their foot down. More competition is a really great way to invigorate one group of players, but it can also raise the barrier to entry for other groups of new players too. A better way to approach this, if you were concerned about Lords of War, might've been to set a goal-post later down the road that new players could see. "We're escalating from 500 to 2000, going up by 250pts every 2 weeks. Once we reach 1500 points, you're allowed to bring Lords of War, but not before" would've set an expectation that "hey, you can buy this, but it's not legal until we reach this point over here". This lets a new player buy the model and get excited for what's ahead and sit on a new purchase, rather than try to push in their new purchase into an entire format not designed for them.


Imagine the reverse situation.

You're getting into Magic. You hear about these cool spells like Damnation, Counterspell, and Sneak Attack. You buy a Commander deck with those cards. But when you join the local group, they have you play in a "starter's group" and have to play the most recently released set only.

Now, in Magic, there's a lot better defined formats. You could ask folks to play Commander, and that's a little easier. In 40k... not so much. We don't have formats like that, and our games are big time investments. If a new player wants to do these things, it's up to us as the veteran players to find ways to make the game MORE open to new players - not less.

El Torro wrote:
I’m of the opinion that 40K shouldn’t be played for money or prizes, simply because the rule set isn’t robust enough to allow for this. Of course not everybody agrees on this point.

Yep. The minute something like this happens, you're basically encouraging people to try and break the game to their advantage, and you're going to attract all the sorts of people I, personally, would never want to play 40K with in a million years.

This sounds like every single step that could have been taken to transform a friendly learning experience into a hyper-competitive, toxic one, was taken and if I'd been involved, I'd have binned it off the second that started happening.

bat702 wrote:
When nerdy gamers turn into Karen's, its a sign of the apocalypse

Have...have you met any nerdy gamers? They're the whiniest bunch of karens ever, if your definition of Karen-ness is "person with an unjustified sense of entitlement/ownership over something that isn't theirs"

Any nerdy gamer that enjoys anything even in concept/in passing feels like they have 100% ownership over that thing and believe themselves to be a member of some kind of approval committee presiding over that thing that whoever actually owns the rights to it needs to run any proposed changes through them.

There's a reason that way back in the 1920s when it was originally made the representation of 'nerdy guy' in the Simpsons was the shrieking "UNACCEPTABLE CONDITION" comic book store guy.

Y’all shoulda gotten the EDH/Commander MtG players instead of the standard players... still though, I feel like a huge part of the problem is how the game very much feels like a mtg game played with miniatures and the mtg players probably picked up on that. Maybe a crusade game would have been better and would have put them in more of a casual/non competitive mindset. Maybe prize support should have been paid on a system that rewards non competitive play, like the equivalent of a rare reject draft (a format of magic the gathering where you play basically with the most unplayable rares in the game). As a goof. And points for best first paint job, points for most interesting conversion, maybe points for teaching new players how to hobby and paint... get creative. I would honestly blame the organizer as much as the mtg players though...