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Even Monopoly (a game from 1935) has resource management, so it's not something that MtG introduced to the game industry.

The main reason why deckbuilding aspect in MtG works and listbuilding in 40K doesn't is that you don't proceed to randomly drawing units from your list each turn - you use the full force of your deck from the very start of the game. You also don't need any resource to activate your "cards". That is horrible design. If you could not only choose cards for your deck but also the order of cards to draw, MtG would never fly as it did.

@LunarSol: the answer to your question lies in the most abstracted version of 40K to date, that is modern Apoc. You can replace everything in the game with literal codex entries cut out from the book and play with those without any miniature on the table and without any loss to the gameplay whatsoever. The last thing that links Apoc to TTG is true distance measuring. Abstract this to spaces based measuring and what you get is Summoner Wars. 8th ed is admittedly a little bit further from this, but compared to wargames of the '90s it is nearly there already.

A CCG game is one in which the environment plays almost no role, and the focal point is on the cards themselves.

Maneuver is not required, you tap a card in magic to deal damage. That is the equivalent to the alpha strike in both AOS and 40k. Tap your unit to show up and charge what you want (with some minor risk like the dice going bad but command abilities in both games pretty much render those very rare)

The battlefield has minimal role in AOS or 40k. Your units can go wherever they like, and terrain does little if anything to hamper them.

Line of sight is based on true line of sight, so is essentially also a non issue because you can practically draw a line and touch most models from any other models somehow and then get to attack/ tap the card and do your damage.

CCGs are often about stacking modifiers and buffs. Tap the card, give another card a bonus. Tap another card, give the card a bonus etc. 40k and AOS are built around those concepts, and are the key components of gameplay.

CCGs often have resources. Those are present in AOS and 40k as command points. Tap the resources to do an ability. Tap your easily farmable command points in 40k or AOS and get to do the ability.

AOS is a little more restricted in that regard but same concept applies.

Wargames in the traditional sense were about deployment, maneuver, and overcoming the battlefield hazards and terrain as much as overcoming your opponent (who also had to do the same things).

Most of those issues have been cleansed from GW "wargames" with some minor caveats. Deployment now is "how can I get as few models in a drop as possible so I can go first and force a double turn (AOS)" or how can I set up the alpha striike that my opponent cannot respond to at all and take in the face while I deploy bubble wrap to screen my own guys from the same.

When I say the games are similar to CCGs I don't mean because the games have moved books in favor of cards, I mean the core gameplay is very similar and in some cases the same.

You could create 40k the CCG and have it play very very closely to 40k the miniatures game right now; the same can also be said of AOS.

There's also something of an issue with how the marketing is managing expectations. Models aren't sold as beautiful models, or an interesting rules twist on existing models, but as more powerful additions to your army. We aren't being sold something fair and unique, we're being sold stuff that's more powerful than existing options.

Which isn't always the case, as some codexes are duds, and new units are often hit or miss, but the marketing really plays into that (and gets labelled 'pay-to-win' sometimes).

I'd say its not fully pay-to-win, but you do have to constantly rotate your collection on a yearly basis if you play in an environment where people min/max every thing 24/7 or don't mind getting destroyed.

So in that aspect its partially pay-to-win because you constantly have to shift armies or buy new units on a yearly basis in many cases.

It's very much a strategy aimed at whales, even if it hasn't been perfected to work perfectly. They're the ones that can make it work; they can afford the churn. Heck, even Hearthstone hasn't figured out how to do that even though they're getting better at putting new cards close to the curve.

In terms of competition though, it's kind of anti-competitive to allow players to buy an advantage. To my mind, more sportsmanlike conduct would be accepting a handicap rather than scrounging an advantage.

It's an interesting conundrum. Terrain is an area that players are still rather insistent on having total control over, and as a result, it feels like developers have reacted to dealing with bespoke gameplay issues created by terrain that doesn't interact well with their rules by largely pulling rules away from terrain. It's something I find rather interesting given how critical map design is in competitive shooters and the like, that this isn't a bigger part of wargaming as a whole, but I definitely agree its an area that's suffered.

I definitely think Infinity makes the best use of the genre in this regard, and its mechanics make an interesting case for the issues created in most other systems. You really start to notice how little a model actually moves in most games and in particularly how little they can "afford" to change their plans mid game. I'm not exactly sure how to fix this in GW land, but I think a lot of it has to do with their turn structure and how they've attempted to incentivize melee combat.

I actually find 8th's terrain mechanics kind of interesting; it just seems designed around terrain that no one (even GW) really plays on. Huge ruin templates with large solid objects in the middle of them just aren't that common. I do think companies have relied on out of date terrain conventions rather than trying to modernize them as they've improved on model rules. "Rough terrain" for example, is the death of interesting and dynamic movement on most tables. Tabletop map design just needs to evolve and appreciate what it can add to the genre.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Nurglitch wrote:
There's also something of an issue with how the marketing is managing expectations. Models aren't sold as beautiful models, or an interesting rules twist on existing models, but as more powerful additions to your army. We aren't being sold something fair and unique, we're being sold stuff that's more powerful than existing options.

Which isn't always the case, as some codexes are duds, and new units are often hit or miss, but the marketing really plays into that (and gets labelled 'pay-to-win' sometimes).

I think that's as much a result of the limitations of trying to express excitement in the limited window of communication marketing provides. GW games are very much molded in the "crush your enemies, see them driven before you" barbaric approach to war, so to sell something as "cool" in that genre, it tends to get marketed as.... well.... crushing your enemies. What you don't see is marketing selling something as actually superior to another option, because there selling the "dominate" idea not as something mechanical but thematic. GW tends to sell everything as the ultimate sword... without mentioning that everyone else has also been sold the ultimate sword.

nou wrote:
@LunarSol: the answer to your question lies in the most abstracted version of 40K to date, that is modern Apoc. You can replace everything in the game with literal codex entries cut out from the book and play with those without any miniature on the table and without any loss to the gameplay whatsoever. The last thing that links Apoc to TTG is true distance measuring. Abstract this to spaces based measuring and what you get is Summoner Wars. 8th ed is admittedly a little bit further from this, but compared to wargames of the '90s it is nearly there already.

Lolwut. No, you really can't. Have you even read the Apocalypse rules? By stripping out all of the rules bloat and dice masturbation of 8th Apocalypse allows the game to focus on the models on the table. Maximizing your army is now about maneuvering units into position and making use of terrain, not just stacking a bunch of auras/stratagems/etc so that your dice are better than your opponent's dice. Perhaps you're making the mistake, as people often do, of playing Apocalypse with all terrain removed so that you can pack more models onto the table?

 auticus wrote:
Perhaps. Right now GW list building is off the chain and it creates immensely powerful negative play experiences in most corners of the game barring the people who enjoy actively breaking the game's balance and limits.

I can go back to the end of WHFB 6th and 7th and there were list restrictions there that were lol'd because even though restrictions were present, the balance was really really awful with certain books that broke the game. So I'm not sure restrictions are the fix so much as badly pointed items that have no downside are in either a restricted or unrestricted environment.

It is both, the less restrictions the harder it is to point things appropriately. Redundancy often increases the value of a unit. If we look at say the beginning of 8th and the malific lord. It would still be good for the points if it were a 0-1 choice, but when you could take 10 of them it was a serious issue. Throw in things like people using AM to get cheap CP, and CP regen (before FAQ), to make more use of powerful abilities in other factions makes it harder to point cost things correctly because the value is different when you look at all the possible options.

The combo/synergy piece also makes pointing things much harder, because the value of say something with an aura ability varies based on what the aura is effecting.

GW games have always had this wonky area where they say the army lists are "flexible" to allow for variety in choice, but then in the same breath go on to say that "abusing" it (e.g. spamming cheap units) should be frowned upon. They aren't alone in this (I have picked up Flames of War and you see similar min/maxing nonsense there too, and this is a historical game) but are probably the worst for the level of imbalance that their "flexible" lists enable.

Wayniac wrote:
GW games have always had this wonky area where they say the army lists are "flexible" to allow for variety in choice, but then in the same breath go on to say that "abusing" it (e.g. spamming cheap units) should be frowned upon. They aren't alone in this (I have picked up Flames of War and you see similar min/maxing nonsense there too, and this is a historical game) but are probably the worst for the level of imbalance that their "flexible" lists enable.

I've always slightly scratched my head at how I often see the same people rail against unit caps in games and then condemn lists that take more than say, 3 of something.

I personally think there should be two modes of play.

Unrestricted and then capped. Capped represents that the really good elite stuff is in short supply. You can't always have as much as you want.

Ultimately though, there is exactly that, particularly in GW games where there are codified modes of play. Players can do what they want as long as they both agree on it; its just that players generally go with types of play that have been vetted at a competitive level because those tend to minimize problems for them at the casual level as well.

In many ways, tournament rules are like the picture settings on your TV. There are ways to improve the experience and honestly, the vast majority of people won't really notice if they've got the wrong settings most of the time. The main difference is that because you have to be more willing to dive into the mechanics of a game to play it than you do to passively watch your TV, the table top crowd has an abnormally high percentage of its audience invested in proper contrast and brightness levels.

Another CCG innovation in 40k and AoS:

The players figure out the balance by figuring out what's worthy of being in their lists/decks and sort it through game play to establish the meta.

In MTG constructed play you typically have 60 cards and 15 in the side board. So you need to look in the card pool and find the most efficient cards. The ones that give you the most power for the slot. The ones that synergize or form a combo to let you do something way more powerful than the text of any one card.

In 40k matched play you typically have 2000 points. So you need to look at your army lists and find the most efficient units. The ones that give you the most power for the points. The ones that synergize or form a combo to let you do something way more powerful than the text of any one datasheet.

Then you take the army/deck to an event and allow the swiss pairings to sort everyone (inefficiently mind you) into winners and losers so by the end of the event the top tables are full of the best players who also have the best lists (of models or cards) and the bottom tables will be full of some combination of the worst players and lists.

Balance has been surrendered to this social structure. The tournament organizers contribute to the testing and they are 100% okay if only a fraction of a given codex is viable. In fact they think it's part of the fun to have players need to identify the good and bad cards/units and make decks/army lists out of the available options. Even if it means the game can utterly break down when people play with the larger card/model pool against such a crafted list.

The whole process is right out of CCGs to the point that the same text describes them both.

 LunarSol wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
GW games have always had this wonky area where they say the army lists are "flexible" to allow for variety in choice, but then in the same breath go on to say that "abusing" it (e.g. spamming cheap units) should be frowned upon. They aren't alone in this (I have picked up Flames of War and you see similar min/maxing nonsense there too, and this is a historical game) but are probably the worst for the level of imbalance that their "flexible" lists enable.

I've always slightly scratched my head at how I often see the same people rail against unit caps in games and then condemn lists that take more than say, 3 of something.

I think you have to consider context. As an IG player, I think it's garbage that I can take nine Leman Russes and GW considers that fine, but I can't use all Veterans for my infantry.

There are two competing factors in play- the ability to create themed armies based on an alternative set of units, which rigid army construction precludes you from doing, versus the tendency to spam the most efficient units, which rigid construction is meant to counter.

I thought WHFB's approach to balancing the two was one of the better ones I've seen. The Core, Special, and Rare distinction allows for a lot of variety in armies constructed from the same set of units, while still preventing the more egregious abuse since the really cool, powerful, exotic stuff is heavily restricted.

 Peregrine wrote:

nou wrote:
@LunarSol: the answer to your question lies in the most abstracted version of 40K to date, that is modern Apoc. You can replace everything in the game with literal codex entries cut out from the book and play with those without any miniature on the table and without any loss to the gameplay whatsoever. The last thing that links Apoc to TTG is true distance measuring. Abstract this to spaces based measuring and what you get is Summoner Wars. 8th ed is admittedly a little bit further from this, but compared to wargames of the '90s it is nearly there already.

Lolwut. No, you really can't. Have you even read the Apocalypse rules? By stripping out all of the rules bloat and dice masturbation of 8th Apocalypse allows the game to focus on the models on the table. Maximizing your army is now about maneuvering units into position and making use of terrain, not just stacking a bunch of auras/stratagems/etc so that your dice are better than your opponent's dice. Perhaps you're making the mistake, as people often do, of playing Apocalypse with all terrain removed so that you can pack more models onto the table?

Yeah, the terrain system in apoc is VASTLY better than the terrain system in 40k...they've just abstracted the one element you just got finished complaining about, which is the TLOS aspect.

Apoc's unit coherency rule makes most pieces of terrain impassable unless you start directly next to them, meaning terrain limits movement far more than in 40k, and the "Embark/Disembark" system of entering any piece of "occupy-able" terrain speeds up the game immensely and removes the micro-advantages that terrain in base 40k offers with crap like "Fully occupied levels prevent charging entirely" and making sure each of your invididual little duders is positioned in a window so you can still shoot.

 auticus wrote:
I personally think there should be two modes of play.

Unrestricted and then capped. Capped represents that the really good elite stuff is in short supply. You can't always have as much as you want.

At least more event formats beyond unrestricted 'Open' events. More stuff like Highlander or even the Fixed Army Format I've been yammering on about.

the_scotsman wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

nou wrote:
@LunarSol: the answer to your question lies in the most abstracted version of 40K to date, that is modern Apoc. You can replace everything in the game with literal codex entries cut out from the book and play with those without any miniature on the table and without any loss to the gameplay whatsoever. The last thing that links Apoc to TTG is true distance measuring. Abstract this to spaces based measuring and what you get is Summoner Wars. 8th ed is admittedly a little bit further from this, but compared to wargames of the '90s it is nearly there already.

Lolwut. No, you really can't. Have you even read the Apocalypse rules? By stripping out all of the rules bloat and dice masturbation of 8th Apocalypse allows the game to focus on the models on the table. Maximizing your army is now about maneuvering units into position and making use of terrain, not just stacking a bunch of auras/stratagems/etc so that your dice are better than your opponent's dice. Perhaps you're making the mistake, as people often do, of playing Apocalypse with all terrain removed so that you can pack more models onto the table?

Yeah, the terrain system in apoc is VASTLY better than the terrain system in 40k...they've just abstracted the one element you just got finished complaining about, which is the TLOS aspect.

Apoc's unit coherency rule makes most pieces of terrain impassable unless you start directly next to them, meaning terrain limits movement far more than in 40k, and the "Embark/Disembark" system of entering any piece of "occupy-able" terrain speeds up the game immensely and removes the micro-advantages that terrain in base 40k offers with crap like "Fully occupied levels prevent charging entirely" and making sure each of your invididual little duders is positioned in a window so you can still shoot.

You have just described any hex/square grid based game with ranged attacks, like you know, Summoner Wars mentioned above. Or Neuroshima Hex. Both of which are card games with a board. And as a sidenote, Neuroshima Hex is far better wargame than both 8th ed or Apoc but my post above had nothing to do with games/rules being better/more playable, only with mechanical classification. Even Blackstone Fortress, a hex based game can handle abstracted LOS in more complete way, as it accounts for mid range partial obscuration which is nonexistent in Apoc.

 frozenwastes wrote:

Balance has been surrendered to this social structure. The tournament organizers contribute to the testing and they are 100% okay if only a fraction of a given codex is viable. In fact they think it's part of the fun to have players need to identify the good and bad cards/units and make decks/army lists out of the available options. Even if it means the game can utterly break down when people play with the larger card/model pool against such a crafted list.

I think you're mixing up a little cause and effect here. I think what a lot of people don't appreciate is that having any significant volume of competitive options is remarkably hard. This gets significantly harder if your only barometer for success is the top 8 or so of a tournament (and many people only care about #1). It's remarkably difficult to get 16 or so factions in the top 8 of events; let alone doing that with any diversity within each faction. You're just.... logistically trying to jam 64+ lists into an event that might not have half that number of players when talking locally.

Most people will praise a fraction of a codex being viable because most systems out there struggle to get to a place where every codex is viable in the first place. What's more diverse; a tournament with 8 different ways to win with Eldar or one with Eldar, Marines, Chaos, Orks, Necrons, Nids? I personally vote for the latter, as I'd much rather change units than armies if I want to follow the trends.

Picking out good/bad units its mostly just a result of having choices to make. Similar to wanting 64 lists to fit in a top 8, its hard to get to a point where 10,000 points can fit in 2000. Stuff gets cut and since most people aren't playing enough to actively test a determine the 80% they should cut, a lot of it turns to following leaders. There's generally a lot more options available than people realize, but since we define viability by the 16,000 points that make up the top 8.... well, a lot of stuff doesn't end up there by definition.

catbarf wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
GW games have always had this wonky area where they say the army lists are "flexible" to allow for variety in choice, but then in the same breath go on to say that "abusing" it (e.g. spamming cheap units) should be frowned upon. They aren't alone in this (I have picked up Flames of War and you see similar min/maxing nonsense there too, and this is a historical game) but are probably the worst for the level of imbalance that their "flexible" lists enable.

I've always slightly scratched my head at how I often see the same people rail against unit caps in games and then condemn lists that take more than say, 3 of something.

I think you have to consider context. As an IG player, I think it's garbage that I can take nine Leman Russes and GW considers that fine, but I can't use all Veterans for my infantry.

There are two competing factors in play- the ability to create themed armies based on an alternative set of units, which rigid army construction precludes you from doing, versus the tendency to spam the most efficient units, which rigid construction is meant to counter.

I thought WHFB's approach to balancing the two was one of the better ones I've seen. The Core, Special, and Rare distinction allows for a lot of variety in armies constructed from the same set of units, while still preventing the more egregious abuse since the really cool, powerful, exotic stuff is heavily restricted.

The issue with the WHFB method, or the old FOC method in 40k has always been balance between core units. IF you have strong core units you have an advantage over someone who basically needs to throw points away on core choices.

I think the answer to themed armies is really different army books along with capped units, removal of allies to fill gaps etc.

So for instance a Saim Hann Eldar codex might have access to more units of jet bikes, but more limited or no access to other units, and the points cost for those bikes might be different than in other books.

Then have a different format (like say APOC) where there are no restrictions but that isn't designed to be used for games where winning and losing matters.

Personally, I think the current ally rules are probably the best thing that's happened to the game in quite a while. It really helps consolidate the number of factions into something more manageable, but does so in a way that still requires a decent chunk of any given army to make the table. Personally, I think the primary issue with it currenlty is just that they put all their eggs in the Battalion. I think you can open up a lot of design space by bumping the other detachment type CP to 3 and probably cut down the slots for the Battalion to a max of 2-3 units of all the other types.

The fragmented Imperium is one of the biggest issues with how the factions are organized. There are so many codexes that consist of something like 4 SKUs its just impossible to fit them into the same template as the rest of the game. The equivalent is seeing something like Codex: Wraithknight or Codex: Boyz in the Xenos library. I'd be happier if we saw things brought together into one book proper, but seeing as we're now getting a Codex for every pot of Contrast you can put on a marine, I don't see that happening any time soon.

LunarSol wrote:
I think you're mixing up a little cause and effect here.

I think it's actually a cycle where the rules design, playtesting and matched play event feedback all feed into one another.

There's generally a lot more options available than people realize, but since we define viability by the 16,000 points that make up the top 8.... well, a lot of stuff doesn't end up there by definition.

There's generally a lot more options available than people realize, but since we define viability by the 600 cards that make up the top 8... well, a lot of cards don't end up there by definition.

Your post is exactly what I'm talking about. I don't think we really disagree at all. People always say in MTG that there are so many more options in the card pool than the proven decks in a given format in the exact same way you described 40k tournaments.

I don't actually think the use of swiss pairing and list building to handle the balance side of things is necessarily bad. The problem is that it just doesn't serve everyone. From what I understand in magic, it works out with an acceptance that some decks are simply not appropriate in some games. It's just not okay to play a competitive deck at a kitchen table without checking with the opponent first. People are left to figuring out, to the best of their ability, the relative power levels of their decks.

40k is no different. Outside of tournaments people still need to come to a common understanding of how tuned they want the lists to be. The problem comes when there's a social mismatch. When someone is more towards the competitive side of things and another person built and army based on what they thought looked cool or what they wanted to paint. I think in MTG terms they often talk about this same sort of mismatch by saying things like "my opponent was just playing a pile of cards" to contrast it with lists/decks that are built with intention.

Sunny Side Up wrote:
Extracts the competitive 40K facebook group. There's pages upon pages of this stuff there suddenly.

I am not sure why there is so much rage among tournament players?

Did something happen? I thought the community actually came closer together with 8th.

So come to a forum to discuss FB. That's grand.

There's no way to determine what makes people butt's hurt. They just like to have hurt butts. Its the nature of internet warriors.

 frozenwastes wrote:

40k is no different. Outside of tournaments people still need to come to a common understanding of how tuned they want the lists to be. The problem comes when there's a social mismatch. When someone is more towards the competitive side of things and another person built and army based on what they thought looked cool or what they wanted to paint. I think in MTG terms they often talk about this same sort of mismatch by saying things like "my opponent was just playing a pile of cards" to contrast it with lists/decks that are built with intention.

You're right, I don't think we really disagree here; I'm just somewhat realistic that playing with any random pile of cards isn't going to work against something with a plan behind it. To a degree, it comes down to that argument of freedom of options vs practical options. I mean, by the rules you can play with 60 basic lands if you like. Does the game need to make that competitive as playing with a creature? Should the game mandate a basic level of competency or is there fun and value in discovering these things? The activity of tuning itself is something a lot of people enjoy after all.

What I'll say is that I'm in favor of trying to design everything with a purpose in mind. 40k is rampant with redundant units that seem to exist simply because there are too many factions differentiated by their paint job so when you make a kit you might as well give it to all of them. Relying on points to balance things out seems to be something that greatly exacerbates this, particularly as new releases continue to eat up design space.

Ultimately my answer is to be practical about it. Building to a competitive level isn't exactly difficult, and in a system where there's a place at least for every Codex, there's something that can be done, even if it doesn't cover every unit. The important thing is to not go completely crazy with your pet projects. Spending a couple hundred points on something "worth" about half that isn't going to tank my list on its own. It's sub optimal, but there's enough variance in the game that its not going to ruin your day. People get in trouble when they decide they need their whole army to be made up of their favorite unit and unless you're totally accepting of the consequences, that's not a great idea even if that unit is pretty good. It'll win, but its going to be a big loss whenever things change. That's actually another reason I quite like the ally system. Lists are a lot more resilient to change when generally only a third of them are changing at a time.

I totally agree that it actually only takes the intention to have a plan for the army to make it something more than a collection of units I thought were cool (pile of cards). Tournament lists don't happen by accident and if you just make sure you have your command point source and then take stuff that can hit and be hit and capture objectives and make sure there's synergy between both units and faction rules anyone can go to an event and feel like they're actually playing the game. I don't think it's bad that this is in common with how there are the basics of deckbuilding in MTG. I'm merely pointing out that people do this and then the swiss pairing system sorts things from there.

All it takes for an event to have enough participants and rounds to allow the sorting to happen and most people will finish out the event playing appropriately matched armies and opponents. Even if people take a pile of cards the swiss pairing system will eventually pair them up with like minded individuals.

Some people even go to events specifically to have a blast playing with like minded individuals at the bottom tables.

The ally point is actually awesome. I think you're right about that. It is cool that a new army release or codex doesn't have to invalidate an entire army. It is, again, like CCGs where a new set or rotation doesn't have to invalidate a deck. Many times a given deck archetype can survive a new release or the removal of an old release and its replacement.

Having a loyal 32 to generate command points is like having a good mana base and a selection of staples in modern in MTG. It let's you take advantage of pretty much everything released for Imperium.

You're right, I don't think we really disagree here; I'm just somewhat realistic that playing with any random pile of cards isn't going to work against something with a plan behind it. To a degree, it comes down to that argument of freedom of options vs practical options. I mean, by the rules you can play with 60 basic lands if you like. Does the game need to make that competitive as playing with a creature? Should the game mandate a basic level of competency or is there fun and value in discovering these things? The activity of tuning itself is something a lot of people enjoy after all.

Issue is though that GW can't even manage to write an Archetype propperly in order to make the "plan" even on the most baseline level work.

F.e. Daemonengine lists of the brazen beasts.
Or daemonengine lists in general.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

The ally point is actually awesome. I think you're right about that. It is cool that a new army release or codex doesn't have to invalidate an entire army. It is, again, like CCGs where a new set or rotation doesn't have to invalidate a deck. Many times a given deck archetype can survive a new release or the removal of an old release and its replacement.

Having a loyal 32 to generate command points is like having a good mana base and a selection of staples in modern in MTG. It let's you take advantage of pretty much everything released for Imperium.

And by consequence Fething up balance for all other overarching factions?

Yeah no, i think i 'll pass. the CP system is flawed to no end.

Oh I agree that it's flawed. I'd rather a system like AoS where they trickle in each turn at the same rate for everyone. Or are scenario based.

I sum up this topic as people are falling into becoming "advocates" for a specific format like ITC/ETC/NOVA and there is a typical behaviour of "pushing the idea that these formats have actual merit." None of them do, they are all basically house ruled games e.g. the format part. I am not saying it doesn't take skill or game knowledge to play in these formats but when specific people are pushing "this is pinnacle of table top sport." That's when the fanboys come out the wood works. Not to mention the biggest problem 40k has from a competitive standpoint is that the terrain rules play such a massive effect in game when the terrain rules suck or don't exists. Thus leading to biased mechanics that I generally disagree with.

Not Online!!! wrote:

And by consequence Fething up balance for all other overarching factions?

Yeah no, i think i 'll pass. the CP system is flawed to no end.

It really isn't, simply because all the other factions have something similar built in rather than pointlessly spun out into their own thing. Wraith Knights have Dire Avengers in the same codex. People seem unwilling to admit that Orks compete with a single codex because that codex is full of nearly as many sub factions as an entire soup faction and can build armies under the same principles. The only difference is just how many times for the Imperium GW has historically released a new kit and claimed its an entire faction when there's not nearly enough out to support it.

ThatMG wrote:
I sum up this topic as people are falling into becoming "advocates" for a specific format like ITC/ETC/NOVA and there is a typical behaviour of "pushing the idea that these formats have actual merit." None of them do, they are all basically house ruled games e.g. the format part. I am not saying it doesn't take skill or game knowledge to play in these formats but when specific people are pushing "this is pinnacle of table top sport." That's when the fanboys come out the wood works. Not to mention the biggest problem 40k has from a competitive standpoint is that the terrain rules play such a massive effect in game when the terrain rules suck or don't exists. Thus leading to biased mechanics that I generally disagree with.

These kinds of posts spank of not really knowing much of anything. The NOVA format, for example, has never advocated a sport feel or anything similar (in fact, I'd say we staunchly oppose any effort to turn 40K into a sport); merely presenting as fair a format and experience for all player types as possible within a 40K tournament. As far as being house rules, well ... our on-site judges include the guy who wrote 40K 8th and is the senior rules writer for the game. I don't imagine he'd agree with your assessment, though one never knows.

This thread remains an entertaining read, however. 40K is a game, it's a fun game, and it's fun to play games. It wasn't built for tournament play in 8th edition, and it's neat that the thousands of people who enjoy playing in 40K tournaments have a robust community of organizers out there to provide them with even more fun times. Whether it is competitive isn't really as important as the fact lots of people have tons of fun playing in tournaments, and spend almost 0 time insulting or being offended by people who *Don't* like tournaments. It's too bad it doesn't work the other way around so often.

and spend almost 0 time insulting or being offended by people who *Don't* like tournaments. It's too bad it doesn't work the other way around so often

I had to have a chuckle at this one because I am around plenty of the other side as well. (I'm around both pretty much equally)