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I agree with Stelek that the metagame is a myth.

Sirtlin talks about video games such as Street Fighter II... there is no connection.

Afrikan Blonde wrote:I agree with Stelek that the metagame is a myth.

If you think that metagame as a general concept doesn't exist, you're wrong. If you think that 40k doesn't have a stable or developed metagame, you're absolutely right. My suggestions to tournament organizers would help establish a more developed metagame, though stability is always an issue when the game changes significantly two or three times a year.

Afrikan Blonde wrote:Sirtlin talks about video games such as Street Fighter II... there is no connection.

video games

Yeah the right combos using Ken in SF II is very helpful for me to win with my army in 40k... Am I missing something here?

There is no metagame because the game is played in small pockets for the most part. There are only a handful of national players compared to the average gamer. If you played in the circuit you would quickly come to learn that the best players often feature lists that are not net lists... it's not always the case such as leaf blower list.

Hi all.
The 40k rule set in all its 5 encarnations has NEVER been developed for balanced competitive play.
The 40k rule set has only been written to help sell minatures.
The Rogue Trader(1st ed,) rules were just a WHFB 3rd ed conversion to help sell Citadels Sci-Fi minature range.

If peple delude themselves into thinking winning a game of 40k makes them superior in some way, they are misguided.
GW PLC will sell as much GW product to anyoe who will buy it, and keep quiet about its suitability for thier intended use.

Not legaly wrong, but moraly questionable .IMO.

TTFN
Lanrak

This recent BoLS post exemplifies many of the problems with the current tournament system.

Lanrak wrote:If peple delude themselves into thinking winning a game of 40k makes them superior in some way, they are misguided.

Psh.

Everybody knows that every tournament win makes your peen larger.

Fetterkey wrote:This recent BoLS post exemplifies many of the problems with the current tournament system.

okay I read the article by Jawaballs whom I respect as a fellow Blood Angels player. His article addressed how to deal with missions used at various tournaments. Again I will say that I think your problem is with the TOs not the rules for the game. If you are going to pay money to travel and play at a remote event then it only behooves you to do some research in advance as pointed out by Jawaballs. I think for example people who annually play at Adepticon have a very good idea of what to expect. It's your choice where you play - if you don't like big armies then why bother playing in Ard Boys or the Gladiator? Adepticon has the RTT on Sunday which is 1750-1850 points. They post sample missions on their website. The Ard Boyz this year had the missions posted in advance for the prelims and semis, plus the missions in the finals were pretty much traight out of the rulebook for the most part with no big twists. The vast majority of events are 1750 - 1850 points. You know that typically there all be objective based missions and killpoints. It's not rocket science by any stretch of the imagination.

JohnHwangDD wrote:

Lanrak wrote:If peple delude themselves into thinking winning a game of 40k makes them superior in some way, they are misguided.

Psh.

Everybody knows that every tournament win makes your peen larger.

This is very true as far as MTG goes. I've have'nt played in a 40k tourny yet though.

I think people will get competitive with any activity, look at the guiness book of world records. It doesnt seem like Warhammer was made to be competitive, but people will want to play it competitvely. They want to try and prove their the best. As with any game, theres broken builds and strategies, and there should be. If you want to win that bad, you'll abuse every rule you can, use any loophole available, bring anything overpowered you have. That's just the way games go, somebody out there wants to win no matter what. I've played competitve magic for years now, (I'm on a hiatus momentarily) and if whatever redunkulous card made wins, people spam it. These people are known as "spikes" in the MTG realms. Thats just the nature of the beast. Im all for 40k being played competitvly perfect or not, improvable or not. Because I like a challenge, CSM lash lists are cool to me, same with nidzilla, nob bikerz and LR spam etc. If you dont want to play competitivly, that's perfectly fine, I don't feel Im at that skill level yet myself. But I don't think its fair to disparage competitve 40k play, just because some improvements could be made, hopefully they will be made, but people are just gonna continue to play in whatever manner they like until then. (sorry if i was rambling there guys)

We've already addressed the fact that the rules are not written from a competitive standpoint. I'm now addressing ways that the tournament scene could be made more competitive. Having to do research to see whether your army is going to be screwed by a bad scenario is awful. Being unable to use the contents of the core rulebook to practice tactics and builds is awful.

Pure conjecture. I don't remember you explaining why the rules are devoid of competitive play.

Fetterkey wrote:We've already addressed the fact that the rules are not written from a competitive standpoint. I'm now addressing ways that the tournament scene could be made more competitive.

If you manage to unify tournament organizers to follow some kind of standardized, practical, balanced way of doing things many people will love you. However, many people will be pissed at you for it too. Lots of people who depend on their cheesy list are gonna freak out and complain, throw fits/quit the game. That and I think your aiming a little too high with that, like afrikan blonde said. Not that I'm against tweaking the tournament scene to be more user friendly. It's just the powers that be either don't want to do that, or don't want to put the effort in when they win with their nob bikerz just fine. Usually uber-competitive players have the resources to go out and buy the latest "uber-tech" (another magic term) to keep winning. You gotta have to come up with a system that everybody can live with. I myself like the idea of 500 point tournaments, cheap to do, no rules tweaking needed, and the games would go faster.

Having to do research to see whether your army is going to be screwed by a bad scenario is awful.

Having to research the meta-game to see if your list is viable, is just part of competitive gaming. If I want my green-white magic deck to win, I gotta look into what strategies are popular/powerful and make sure I can handle em. Same goes for 40k, when I go to my FLGS, I check out what people are using. Then I either borrow/expand on their ideas, or think of ways to counter their list.

Being unable to use the contents of the core rulebook to practice tactics and builds is awful.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean here, do you mean putting all of the codexes in the BGB? I think GW does'nt do this intentionally, to add a level of secrecy to the game, If you know how your opponent's whole army works It's harder for him to pull any surprises on you. They also couldn't sell as many codexes this way, or sell them individually. Thus, if this was what you meant, never gonna happen.

Norwulf wrote:
If you manage to unify tournament organizers to follow some kind of standardized, practical, balanced way of doing things many people will love you. However, many people will be pissed at you for it too. Lots of people who depend on their cheesy list are gonna freak out and complain, throw fits/quit the game.

Net-rage without much factual support. Truly competitive players are doing their own research (yes, that includes being cognizant of the newest 'net-deck' addition), finding out what works, tweaking their lists, and creating true all-comers armies that can win in any situation. The guy who downloads an Internet list and slaps a bunch of plastic onto the table might be a win-at-all-costs-competitive type of person but he WILL get rolled by a truly competitive player that understands his army, the rules, and capitalizes on opportunities better.

It's just the powers that be either don't want to do that, or don't want to put the effort in when they win with their nob bikerz just fine.

Nob Bikers isn't competitive and hasn't been for some time. Arguably never was since objectives can be placed on the 3rd floor of a building, but the superiority of Nob Bikers was pretty much buried by the time the IG codex came out. Nobody competitive bothers with a gimmick army.

Usually uber-competitive players have the resources to go out and buy the latest "uber-tech" (another magic term) to keep winning. You gotta have to come up with a system that everybody can live with. I myself like the idea of 500 point tournaments, cheap to do, no rules tweaking needed, and the games would go faster.

500 point games are grossly imbalanced towards whoever has the most effective troops. Space Marines? Congratulations, you have a commander and two Tac squads. It'll be a lot of fun when the guy with a Big Mek and seventy Boyz simply walks across the table and kicks your teeth in.

If you truly streamlined/clarified/updated the 40k rules set and tournament system to resemble something more like Poker tournaments nobody would be happier than the Competitive Gamer. It's the '40k is supposed to be a casual hobby' mentality that makes it an inferior game system for competitive play, not the people who wish it to be moreso.

I think it's pretty short-sighted to come out with a thread stating 40k is uncompetitive. Whether or not the "Rules As Written" were intended to be totally uncompetitive, the 40k community is a somewhat competitive environment. So much so that as the metagame changes GW runs out of meltaguns because everyone is buying them up like crazy.

Have you looked at the number of posts and new threads daily in the tactics or army list section on this very forum? Or any of the other various 40k forums?

This alone should serve as an example that a lot of players are seeking advice and discussion with fellow gamers to make their own game better.

I consider myself a mostly casual gamer, mostly because I don't have the time to go to a lot of tourneys right now, but I still enjoy pulling off a great victory and do like winning over losing.

Afrikan Blonde wrote:Pure conjecture. I don't remember you explaining why the rules are devoid of competitive play.

Go reread the thread, or better yet leave entirely. I'm done explaining obvious points to you.

Norwulf wrote:Having to research the meta-game to see if your list is viable, is just part of competitive gaming

That's true. However, the event itself should not arbitrarily punish certain lists. That's silly and uncompetitive-- imagine a Magic tournament where the organizers suddenly declared that all green spells cost an additional mana for one round, and all red creatures got +1/+1!

Norwulf wrote:I'm not exactly sure what you mean here, do you mean putting all of the codexes in the BGB?

I mean that the standard scenarios used in the big book should generally reflect the sort of scenarios played in tournament play-- at least, if you want a competitive event. Crazy scenarios are fun for pick-up games, campaigns and the like, but if you put them in your event, you seriously diminish its competitive value.

Consideration of changes to make the game more suited to competitive play need to be checked against the other kinds of fun found in the game. The reality is that this is a hobby that can approached in many different ways, with emphasis on ultra-competitive play, on fluff and theme, on story telling, on miniatures and the visual aspect, on and on variety and just watching gonzo stuff happen.

It gets complicated because rules cannot perfectly support all these elements at all times. When talking about building a gaming environment that better supports competitive play, you have to remember that a lot of us don't want 40K to be geared towards competitive play, we'll happily accept a level of imbalance and basic unfairness to keep diversity.

Good points, sebster-- that's part of why my advice is oriented towards tournament organizers instead of Games Workshop. Presumably, people who go to 40k tournaments are interested in playing competitively; hence, those tournaments should be designed in a fashion that supports competitive play as much as possible. For those of us that don't care about competitive 40k, though, the current environment is more or less fine.

There is definitely a meta game regardless of how much it is shaped my the release of new codexes.

The game is not purely competitive like Street Fighter, there is also a hobby aspect which people are very interested in. That is why Bolscon is so awesome, those who do not do so well have their own tournament on day 2.

Any game that people are interested in will have a competitive aspect. This is predicated on the fact that winning is far superior to losing to the human psyche.

Scenarios with a twist make players think outside the box and in fact make the event even more competitive... They reward the player with a balanced list and punished those with the one trick pony.

Afrikan Blonde wrote:Scenarios with a twist make players think outside the box and in fact make the event even more competitive... They reward the player with a balanced list and punished those with the one trick pony.

The thing is, the stuff that many of these scenarios penalize is completely arbitrary. One guy might have an army with one HQ, and his opponent an army with two; when the mission requires you to kill the enemy HQs in order to score points (this actually happened at BoLSCon), the army with two will be favored over the army with one. Does taking two HQs instead of one make your army somehow better or more adaptive? Not as far as I can tell. What if you ended up against a Space Wolf player with four HQs? This is a perfect example of a "twist scenario" that makes the event less competitive by favoring arbitrary choices-- even worse, it favors choices that were made before the game started, which neither player can change going in.

GOOD scenarios declare the enemy commander to be the most expensive HQ, so that to get the points you need to kill just that one.

good scenarios also focus on troops...


I'll give you a few examples of scenarios at a tournament I played recently, that I thought were pretty cool....

1) Get a VIP model from your deployment zone off the enemies table edge. extra points if you never put him in a transport.

2) choose 1 troops choice in your army. it now gets +1WS, +1BS, +1Str, or relentless... your objective is to keep that squad alive while killing your enemies upgraded troops squad.

there are a few other scenarios, but they are similar to others i've played before. these two just strike me as unusual, and pretty cool.

I've played in 3 tourneys (2 in Canada, 1 at Warhammer World - 1st/1st/4th respectively ) and I can tell you 40K is a game that can get very competitive.

I've seen players kicked from tournaments and have seen a judge being assaulted because the player got a bit hot under the collar.

I played MTG competitively and 40K is just as competitive. The top tier MTG decks can cost as much as an army and some tourney winning armies can cost upto $1000 because they are heavily converted.

On the subject of 40K being designed as a competitive game - no it isn't. Its we the players that have made it so.

I agree, but its fun to try.

Turning something that isn't competitive into something that is, is usually more fun than something that was made to be competitive.

Fetterkey wrote:

Afrikan Blonde wrote:Scenarios with a twist make players think outside the box and in fact make the event even more competitive... They reward the player with a balanced list and punished those with the one trick pony.

The thing is, the stuff that many of these scenarios penalize is completely arbitrary. One guy might have an army with one HQ, and his opponent an army with two; when the mission requires you to kill the enemy HQs in order to score points (this actually happened at BoLSCon), the army with two will be favored over the army with one. Does taking two HQs instead of one make your army somehow better or more adaptive? Not as far as I can tell. What if you ended up against a Space Wolf player with four HQs? This is a perfect example of a "twist scenario" that makes the event less competitive by favoring arbitrary choices-- even worse, it favors choices that were made before the game started, which neither player can change going in.

Chance is a BIG part of life. You cannot boil life down to a simple equation. The things you are not prepared for will affect you the most.

If it wasnt competitive why try and win?

Warhammer40k can be as competitive as any other game in the right setting, though overall I agree, Warhammer is designed for amusement rather than anything else.

@sourclams: I'm not saying nob bikerz are the best army, or any net-list for that matter, (im a super-secrect-tech kinda guy anyway). I used those examples because i've heard of em being top tier or whatever. I havent played in a 40k tournament, so I apparantly used poor examples. But I have played in well over a 100 MTG tournaments, and from my experiance with that i was trying to make 3 major points.

1) Having some kind of universal mission scenario set, or rules set amongst TOs, seems really optimistic to me.
2) Nerds (like myself, im in this group too) nerds bitch about everything, when you fix it they complain, when you nerf it they complain. You can't please everyone, so if most people are happy, why bother?
3) "Over powered" builds are just part of the territory of competitive gaming, somebody always figures out the most optimal strategy, this somebody usually takes first place. Its just the natureal course of competitive gaming. If playing black/blue fairies with bitterblossom is what's gonna win the MTG tournament, play it.

Fetterkey wrote:That's true. However, the event itself should not arbitrarily punish certain lists. That's silly and uncompetitive-- imagine a Magic tournament where the organizers suddenly declared that all green spells cost an additional mana for one round, and all red creatures got +1/+1!

WOTC does this ALL THE TIME! They punish certain lists in every set, if you were playing magic when time spiral was out and you didnt use "Tarmogoyf", you probably didnt win. If you had that badass netdeck full of "ravagers" and "skullclamps" during Mirrodin, Wizards punished you and banned/restriced everything. Magic has this syndrome waaaaay worse than 40k. If MaRo goes "derr de derr, we're gonna print this 1G mana 1/1 that gets +4/4 a turn." it throws the game off wildly. All the Type 2 players go out and buy the flavour of the month. No one plays white or blue etc. if it doesnt have that over powered card in that particular color. This is exactly why I deverted my interest away from magic towards 40k for a while. It's all about who can afford those $50 plains walkers and the flavor of the month.

Where I've only spent a couple hundred bucks on 40k, I still win fairly often. I havent got into the tournament scene yet, so casual play is still fun/challenging, (not the case with magic at all), and to play at my FLGS I dont have to buy new crap for it as constantly. Seems to me that 40k tournaments are actually more user friendly than magic, at least on a local level.

I spend up to $300 on 40k per year on 40k. That's not even enough to cover a weekly FNM Booster Draft. MtG is clearly more expensive than 40k.

JohnHwangDD wrote:I spend up to $300 on 40k per year on 40k. That's not even enough to cover a weekly FNM Booster Draft. MtG is clearly more expensive than 40k.

Are you being sarcastic? or Agreeing with me?

Norwulf wrote:

Fetterkey wrote:That's true. However, the event itself should not arbitrarily punish certain lists. That's silly and uncompetitive-- imagine a Magic tournament where the organizers suddenly declared that all green spells cost an additional mana for one round, and all red creatures got +1/+1!

WOTC does this ALL THE TIME! They punish certain lists in every set, if you were playing magic when time spiral was out and you didnt use "Tarmogoyf", you probably didnt win. If you had that badass netdeck full of "ravagers" and "skullclamps" during Mirrodin, Wizards punished you and banned/restriced everything. Magic has this syndrome waaaaay worse than 40k. If MaRo goes "derr de derr, we're gonna print this 1G mana 1/1 that gets +4/4 a turn." it throws the game off wildly. All the Type 2 players go out and buy the flavour of the month. No one plays white or blue etc. if it doesnt have that over powered card in that particular color. This is exactly why I deverted my interest away from magic towards 40k for a while. It's all about who can afford those $50 plains walkers and the flavor of the month.

Wizards bans certain things because they break the game. That's different from my example. To restate: Imagine that there were two gaming stores in your town having a Magic tournament. At one store, they follow the standard rules of Magic. At the other, the organizers decide that they should throw people for a loop and force them to adapt, so they declare that all green spells cost an additional mana for one round, and all red creatures get +1/+1. The first store is obviously better. 40k tournaments work the same way. Tournament organizers shouldn't use scenarios that allow one army to arbitrarily "win" before the game is even played.

Norwulf wrote:

WOTC does this ALL THE TIME! They punish certain lists in every set, if you were playing magic when time spiral was out and you didnt use "Tarmogoyf", you probably didnt win. If you had that badass netdeck full of "ravagers" and "skullclamps" during Mirrodin, Wizards punished you and banned/restriced everything. Magic has this syndrome waaaaay worse than 40k. If MaRo goes "derr de derr, we're gonna print this 1G mana 1/1 that gets +4/4 a turn." it throws the game off wildly. All the Type 2 players go out and buy the flavour of the month. No one plays white or blue etc. if it doesnt have that over powered card in that particular color. This is exactly why I deverted my interest away from magic towards 40k for a while. It's all about who can afford those $50 plains walkers and the flavor of the month.

Where I've only spent a couple hundred bucks on 40k, I still win fairly often. I havent got into the tournament scene yet, so casual play is still fun/challenging, (not the case with magic at all), and to play at my FLGS I dont have to buy new crap for it as constantly. Seems to me that 40k tournaments are actually more user friendly than magic, at least on a local level.

You need to read more carefully. Yes, WotC changes things in expansions and with the banned/restricted list, but it's not done as a surprise at the beginning of any given tournament. A mission that requires you to kill all enemy HQs to win doesn't have anything to do with balance: it simply arbitrarily picks players to have an advantage. It also does so with not chance to prepare, or if you do, it severely limits the armies you can bring.