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 Ailaros wrote:
When 6th ed game out, there were a few rules that I had come to the conclusion that would not create WAAC and TFG behavior, but it would rather reveal this kind of character, as it stripped away constraints on abuse. It turns out that more or less the entirety of 6th ed is that way. All you'll probably need to do is to read a person's army list to figure out if there's any serious chance of anything interesting happening, as the kind of person you're not going to want to play against will make their attitude towards the game pretty clear by the time you read their list.

Yeah, except by your previous comments there's an absurdly huge range of lists that count as WAAC and TFG behavior:

Gunline armies are of course TFG armies, even when they're fluffy armies like a foot IG gunline, because they're too good against assault armies that don't bother to bring any shooting or any movement beyond walking 6" across the table each turn.

Flyer-heavy armies are TFG armies, even when they're fluffy armies like Elysian drop troops, because they're too good against armies that don't bring AA and/or objective holders that can laugh at flyers.

Anyone who plays Tau is TFG because the Tau want to keep you from assaulting, and it's not fun for assault players if they don't get to assault. Oh, and most Eldar armies are probably in this category too.

Midrange shooting armies like Draigowing are TFG armies because they can walk backwards at the same speed as an assault army (at least a bad assault army with no mobility) and deny assault until they've shot the assault army to death.


In short, calling something TFG or WAAC really loses its impact when it seems to apply to everything outside of "the exact army I want to play and play against". The simplest answer is that 40k just isn't the game for you, and you should quit and find a better one. You're never going to be happy unless you're playing against a clone of yourself, so why keep trying?

How i have fun kill a termi in cc with a squad of fw ;p. But ye go in expectin to kill all ur men in blood filled warfare ^.^ de just minis you put em back on the table at the end of te game no harm in losin

I have enjoyed every single game I have played in 6th edition. I have been doing pretty well and losing close games. In 5th I played against BA spam, IG, parking lots, and GK Purifier spam. That stuff is over. I add in some TH/SS termies to my double executioner russ IG army, or add in some thunderwolf cavalry to my Tau list, its pure awesome. I also have had some really horrific dice rolling in the past, I mean really god awful an with prescience I am able to neutralize that a bit.

In short I love 6th edition.

Try to find some like minded players that if they were to lose, won't hate rage. Hard to do at the LGS but possible.

That's right you guys wear red in the woods and stand shoulder to shoulder.

Hilarious as warfare was back in the day I would like to weigh in on this little textual firestorm and point out that anachronisms aren't exactly fair points.

Now then, I don't think that anyone is trying to insinuate that Warhammer 40k (or most, if any, similar tabletop wargames) is on the same competitive/tactical/etc. level as Chess, Football, Yankball, or what have you. I'm finding the lot of you to be nasty, angry internet people, but I think that our dear friend from the Officio Assassinorum has had his original points taken greatly out of context. This'll probably backfire horribly, but I'm going to try to weigh in here and see if I can't get you folks from squabbling like Lootas over an Assault Cannon.

Point one, and I've already stated it, I don't think any of us here are really trying to equate 40k with Chess on a competitive level. On that note, even if Chess or a similarly mainstream competitive activity is, well, competitive it doesn't mean that it can't also be a perfectly good activity to partake in casually, also. With heavily personalised armies and terrain coupled with lots of background story, Warhammer 40k presents a greater opportunity for a narrative, story-telling, friendly game than Chess does. That being said, it IS a game where one force tries to beat another force. I would say that is an inherently competitive aspect; not necessarily die-hard competitive by any means, but I think it's safe to say that often someone plays a game of 40k hoping to win.

Furthermore, 40k tournaments tend to occur wherever 40k is sold, from my experience. People want to practice and compete in these tournaments, and as such are likely to play games with an army designed to improve their chances--a 'competitive' army. Sure, it is not like Chess where there is a proper, consistent counter to everything, but at the very least one can build their army in a way that improves the chances of success as much as possible. Fun games and competitive games are not mutually exclusive. Anyone keeping up with the new edition, be they casual or competitive, has the 6th edition material to work with and casual and competitive play styles will adapt accordingly, if not in different ways. Which way is 'right' simply depends on what the player hopes to get out of the game.




Edit: On a side note, I'm having much better assaults with my DE since sixth edition rolled around. Go figure.

Likan Wolfsheim wrote:

Edit: On a side note, I'm having much better assaults with my DE since sixth edition rolled around. Go figure.

Funny, I think I've only bee able to make 1/4th of my assaults since this edition came out... Granted I've only been able to get 3 or so games in... I'm trying to say I have bad luck.

Big'Uns wrote:Muahahaha...... Yeah, Craps is a game of skill too....

Perhaps some Vegas people could explain this, but my understanding is that craps is not a highly skill-based game. Some gamblers prefer this, as they can get sloppy drunk and still win.

On the other hand, Blackjack, still a game with random elements, is a game of skill. A good player can push the odds in their favour, and a really good player (one who knows how to count cards) is deemed to have too much of an edge over the house to allow them to play.

People keep making the mistake that simply because there are dice in a game, the outcome must be random. When the same people keep winning large tournaments, year after year, there's some pretty conclusive evidence that shows that, in spite of the fact that there are dice involved, there are skills that can be mastered and these skills will result in games being won, or lost, accordingly.

What people don't like about 6th ed is that there are now too many cases where singular dice rolls have too great an impact on whether a game is won or lost. And so I shall return to the blackjack example for why this bothers people.

An average blackjack player can play one hand for all their money and expect to win or lose based on that one hand just as much as if they spread their play over multiple hands. A good blackjack player, however, would never put down all their money on one hand, because it's not one random event that they're basing their win/loss ratio on, it's that they expect to push the odds in their favour over time. If a good blackjack player were forced to put their entire bankroll on one hand, they'd do no better than the average player.

The good players don't want to play a game where their win/loss ratio is based on luck, if they did, they'd be at the craps or roulette table. They're playing blackjack because they want their skill to matter.

It's the same with 40k. Except that the difference between 5th and 6th is that there are more events that can swing a game on a single roll now than there were before. When a player loses half their squad leaders and characters due to a mysterious terrain effect, when the board ends up 50% empty due to crappy terrain density rolls, or when one player is able to score an extra 3 victory points due to a warlord trait, these push the game more towards the random and away from the skill.

Combine this with the fact that a game takes 2+ hours to play, and one of these random rolls early in the game can waste both player's time. We've all seen the threads where someone posts "my opponent quit just because I rolled X" . Well, that's how this works out. So, then we hear the solution, "if you get one of those things, just re-roll it" - well, if we're going to just throw out any result we don't like, why bother rolling in the first place?

Someone summed this up pretty well somewhere else. Paraphrasing, and I don't know who, they said the reason for putting more random events into a game is so that little brother has a chance of beating big brother on family game night. Candyland is a perfect example - it's all luck, there are no choices, and consequently, 4-year-old Timmy will win just as often as 12-year old Jake or 38-year-old Dad. But most people get sick of Candyland by the time they're five, and only play it to humour Timmy.

That's how I view the random crap they added to 6th ed. It gives crappy players a chance to beat good players. Maybe GW was too tired of having people quit when they never won games, so they figured, rather than actually balance the armies, they'd just toss in random chances so that bad armies could still win occasionally.

I certainly agree, blackjack is an excellent analogy for the type of game that 40k is. Over hundreds of games, a person with a little bit more skill will probably win a game or two more than a person with a little less skill, certainly.

In the case of 40k, though, sample sizes are way, WAY too small to see the effect of skill from relatively close-in-skill opponents. You only need to win roughly 4 games in a row to win a tournament. That's much to coarse to see small differences in player skill. Indeed, most people will never play a hundred games against a single opponent, and even then, those extra few wins could very likely be missed.

The fact that the only transmission system for player skill (outside of the movement phase and target prioritization) is through randomness does not fully invalidate player skill by any means. Every time that you need to roll dice to see if your plans succeed, though, it's a dice game, and it's the specific random events that determine the ultimate outcome of the game. As not all random events are equally important, really it revolves around a small number of random events for every game.

To think about it another way, a game of 40k is like playing blackjack against someone best two out of three. There is certainly player skill in knowing the odds, but it's still more or less the actual cards that come up in the games that determine the winner of that set. Over many, many sets, the skill difference will become apparent, but over a single game, or even over a few games, the coarsness of the system makes a mockery of any ability to determine which player is more skilled simply by looking at the outcomes of the game.

I've enjoyed 6th ed immensely and I'm what you might call a casual competitive gamer. I like to win, and enjoy the competition, but part of the fun for me is losing, and figuring out what I can do better. I haven't won a game against Necrons since 6th came out. But now I have a plan... and it might even work!
but what we do is bring whatever we find fun. Admittedly I told him that if he brings his flying circus against my space wolves all ML get flakk missiles.
We also set up the terrain together, before either of us know what side, what mission ect. We actually have one terrain piece (a home-built watchtower) that 9/10 games ends up in the middle of the table. It's become tradition that one of us puts it there, usually the person with more objectives.
And above all we just play for fun. Win or lose it's fun because we choose to make it so. TBH other than a few things that I have issue with I'm a bigger fan of 6th than 5th. Hope this rambling post helps

Except that's not really true. 40k games tend to roll enough dice that it's fair to assume average results, and skill gives a meaingful advantage. When your tactical squad is rolling 20 dice for shooting the difference between an average 13 hits and a slightly above average 15 hits is less important than, say, having a good plan to win the mission objectives and knowing which target needs to receive those 13-15 hits to maximize your chances of success. And then there's the question of how you react to the rare event when the dice do something far outside the average. A good player can adjust their plans to handle it, a bad player will lose and blame the dice. And of course there's the entire subject of metagame analysis and list construction, where there are absolutely no random elements and it's entirely a question of player skill.

End result: skill is very much a part of 40k and there's a good reason why the same people tend to win tournaments.


The reason a lot of people hate the new random elements in 6th is that they entirely ignore the "lots of dice" rule and give a table of equally likely outcomes with wildly different results. It entirely removes the ability to make meaningful strategic plans around the tables in the same way that you can plan on a unit doing an average of X wounds and form a strategy for it. There's no strategy to picking warlord traits, for example, you just roll on the table and hope that you get a better one than your opponent.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, when you start banning entire strategies (like calling anyone who plays a gunline army TFG) of course the game becomes random. How can the movement phase possibly involve player skill when there is only one acceptable direction and distance to move (towards the enemy, full distance) and doing anything less is "abhorrent behavior" that ruins your opponent's fun by denying them the ability to assault you. So naturally when the only acceptable strategy is "meet in midfield and let's see who rolls better" you're going to feel that the entire game is based on random chance. Meanwhile those of us sociopaths who use alternative strategies will continue to think otherwise.

Big'Uns wrote: Muahahaha...... Yeah, Craps is a game of skill too....

Redbeard wrote:Perhaps some Vegas people could explain this, but my understanding is that craps is not a highly skill-based game. Some gamblers prefer this, as they can get sloppy drunk and still win.

Edit: (Sarcasm) Craps is not a game of skill. Gambling and hashing bets is. Akin to slots being skill.

Rebeard wrote:On the other hand, Blackjack, still a game with random elements, is a game of skill. A good player can push the odds in their favour, and a really good player (one who knows how to count cards) is deemed to have too much of an edge over [u]the house[/uto allow them to play.

You said it... Players Vs. House.. Not Player Vs. Player.

House ALWAYS wins BTW.. They win in the event of a tie.. 57%

Redbeard wrote:Candyland is a perfect example - it's all luck, there are no choices, and consequently, 4-year-old Timmy will win just as often as 12-year old Jake or 38-year-old Dad. But most people get sick of Candyland by the time they're five, and only play it to humour Timmy.

Candyland is a much better example to parallel Warhammer.


Poker IS a competitive sport with a random element, rather than known, static elements.

Why?

Players start out with the exact same chances with the same 52 cards dealt at random. You cannot go out and purchase a deck that is all face cards. You are not playing apples to oranges. When you sit down to a poker game, probability states that you have the EXCACT same chance of drawing a royal flush as your opponent does. Now with that apple-apple comparison, it is a game of smart betting and bluffs.

Now if you and your opponent could change the layout of your deck of cards without many guidlines and the possibility of a 10year gap between the manufacture of cards and the evolution of the rules associated with them ( Duke of Octogons? WTF?) it would no longer be competitivethat's now in the realm of "fun". It may require skill. Without a doubt. But not competitive in any stretch. Name an olympic sport where you have an option of equipment.

Big'Uns wrote:That's right you guys wear red in the woods and stand shoulder to shoulder.

I was simply recognizing English Assassin's hereditary and genetic inablity to recognize what a "tactic" is. I was not comparing this to warhammer at all.

I kinda wish you had quoted the rest of that.

Likan Wolfsheim wrote:Hilarious as warfare was back in the day I would like to weigh in on this little textual firestorm and point out that anachronisms aren't exactly fair points. Now then, I don't think that anyone is trying to insinuate that Warhammer 40k (or most, if any, similar tabletop wargames) is on the same competitive/tactical/etc. level as Chess, Football, Yankball, or what have you. I'm finding the lot of you to be nasty, angry internet people,

The only way you could deem a game of warhammer to be competitive, Is to have two armies with the same lists, same points and same rules.
For the record: I didn't say anything about warhammer not requiring skill.. However in my experience, it's usually whoever makes the fewest mistakes. Or one army just generally outclasses the other.

 Big'Uns wrote:
But not competitive in any stretch. Name an olympic sport where you have an option of equipment.

Err, every single competitive sport ever? You do realize that we spend obscene amounts of money on developing slight improvements in equipment for athletes, right? And that the intent of that research is absolutely to gain an advantage over the competition through superior equipment?

The only way you could deem a game of warhammer to be competitive, Is to have two armies with the same lists, same points and same rules.
For the record: I didn't say anything about warhammer not requiring skill.. However in my experience, it's usually whoever makes the fewest mistakes. Or one army just generally outclasses the other.

Except that metagame analysis and list creation are part of the competition.

I think that 'competitive' has a much broader meaning than what's being used here:

From Merriam-Webster, for us Yanks:
Competitive:

: 1: relating to, characterized by, or based on competition <competitive sports>

Competition:

1: The act or process of competing : rivalry:

Compete:

1: to strive consciously or unconsciously for an objective (as position, profit, or a prize) : be in a state of rivalry <competing teams> <companies competing for customers>

From the Oxford Dictionary:
Competitive:

1) of, relating to, or characterized by competition: a competitive sport

Competition:

the activity or condition of competing: there is fierce competition between banks

Compete:

strive to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others who are trying to do the same: universities are competing for applicants

Neither dictionary necessitates that competing parties need to be on equal footing or equally equipped. Maybe 40k isn't nearly as big as sports and the like, but I'm fairly certain that by definition a game of 40k is inherently competitive. It has nothing to do with with a level playing field or same equipment. Presumably, barring certain story-telling scenarios, two people who meet for a game of 40k intend to strive to win the game. The game is won by defeating the enemy. How cutthroat and how balanced the game is is beside the point.

Edit: Granted, I would be inclined to believe that more-or-less 'most' people who play 40k do so for fun above all else.

 Redbeard wrote:

Big'Uns wrote:Muahahaha...... Yeah, Craps is a game of skill too....

Waaaah waaaaah waaaaahhh TL;DR

That's how I view the random crap they added to 6th ed. It gives crappy players a chance to beat good players. Maybe GW was too tired of having people quit when they never won games, so they figured, rather than actually balance the armies, they'd just toss in random chances so that bad armies could still win occasionally.

Then. Just. Quit.

I just gave up on 6th edition altogether. If the game's not fun, I really have no business playing it. I enjoy competition and a tactically engaging game. 6th edition does not provide that.

I'll just sit on the bench until 7th comes out. I can only hope that it's not so bad. Either way, I might actually get my Infinity armies painted.

 Big'Uns wrote:
My point is.... And I'll try to type real slow for you... Warhammer... is...not...a....competetive.....game...

Don't let your failure to understand how to play this game well delude you into thinking it impossible to do so.

As for the rest... just grow up.

 English Assassin wrote:

 Big'Uns wrote:
My point is.... And I'll try to type real slow for you... Warhammer... is...not...a....competetive.....game...

Don't let your failure to understand how to play this game well delude you into thinking it impossible to do so.

As for the rest... just grow up.

Hi. I am one of the most decorated local players around competitively, and I completely agree with him (even if I don't think he made his point in the nicest way possible). I will absolutely smash you in a competitive game, but that doesn't mean that I think the game is most fun that way or that it is ideally designed for it. It's clearly not.

Don't assume that all of us "fluff bunnies" can't play the game "well" or that we don't know how to win.

 Xenocidal Maniac wrote:

 Redbeard wrote:

Big'Uns wrote:Muahahaha...... Yeah, Craps is a game of skill too....

Waaaah waaaaah waaaaahhh TL;DR

That's how I view the random crap they added to 6th ed. It gives crappy players a chance to beat good players. Maybe GW was too tired of having people quit when they never won games, so they figured, rather than actually balance the armies, they'd just toss in random chances so that bad armies could still win occasionally.

Then. Just. Quit.

Wow, it's been a while since I've seen anyone quite so blatantly disrespectful to a mod. Sadly, only about 2 or 3 minutes since someone's been that rude to another poster.

Just because you don't understand an argument, doesn't mean that the facts go away when you don't like them. The fact is, 6th brought in an inordinate amount of padding to cover imbalanced rulesets. Random terrain, random psychic powers, random objectives, random warlord traits, random jetpack movement and random charges coupled with allies and bought fortifications have upset many a notion of balance and strategy in this game.

Random charge alone wrecks havoc on balancing assault. Now units have an even larger potential threat range than ever and they also have the chance and distince possibility of failure on what was once accountable. Now you can claim that any CC unit is not OP because there is the very real chance that they won't make that 6 inch charge and have to suffer another round of shooting in addition to overwatch. Meanwhile, people are also making those charges that should NEVER happen. I think we can all name that guy whose dice must be rigged because luck shines on him with the grace of God and he's in heaven because he's making 10 inch charges in pinch situations snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. This just creates a lack of safety zone where there once was. Before the safe distance from any basic infantry unit was over 12". Now the safety distance is over 18" because you never know. You just don't. And that is the main problem with this edition they cooked up is you never know. You won't know how good your army will be until you've set up the board and rolled everything out for your army. You don't know if the movement you're making to assault in a later phase will work out spectacularly or fail miserably based on dice. As wargamers we have made concessions with dice to decide combat actions, we don't like dice to decide our tactical actions. As someone said before, warhammer generally falls to the law of large numbers for combat, but 2d6 falls to a bellcurve of single possibilities for an entire unit's actions.

 Xenocidal Maniac wrote:

Hi. I am one of the most decorated local players around competitively, and I completely agree with him (even if I don't think he made his point in the nicest way possible). I will absolutely smash you in a competitive game, but that doesn't mean that I think the game is most fun that way or that it is ideally designed for it. It's clearly not.

Don't assume that all of us "fluff bunnies" can't play the game "well" or that we don't know how to win.

Hi. I am one of the most decorated local players around competitively,

Hi. You sound like a fun guy to be around.

Is that how you introduce yourself normally? You must be good wth the wimins...

Xenocidal Maniac wrote:Don't assume that all of us "fluff bunnies" can't play the game "well" or that we don't know how to win.

You da best at army mens in L.A.? That must get you mad street cred yo..

Likan Wolfsheim wrote:I think that 'competitive' has a much broader meaning than what's being used here:

From Merriam-Webster, for us Yanks:

When you bust out the dictionary to attack the definition of a word being used during an argument, you don't have much of an argument.

Get out the Thesaurus instead.

Big'Uns wrote: But not competitive in any stretch. Name an olympic sport where you have an option of equipment.

Peregrine wrote:Err, every single competitive sport ever? You do realize that we spend obscene amounts of money on developing slight improvements in equipment for athletes, right? And that the intent of that research is absolutely to gain an advantage over the competition through superior equipment?

I hope you mean training equipment. There are very specific guidlines as to what can be taken during competitition. Even in your neck of the woods, NASCAR cars can only weigh so much. They can only be of a certain size.. etc.. Any loopholes discovered in competitive sport that are exploited are usually summarily closed and the parties involved are considered to be bad sportsman..the competitive side of warhammer is just that, nothing more than the exploitation of loopholes and non-disclosure.

Laymens : Bad sportsmanship

I start game of army mens.
I hurl insults at opponent until he quits.
I win at army mens.

I must be skilled player of competitive game.

We all know how absolutely crucial it is for to win.

Ailaros wrote:I certainly agree, blackjack is an excellent analogy for the type of game that 40k is. Over hundreds of games, a person with a little bit more skill will probably win a game or two more than a person with a little less skill, certainly.

You're reading the analogy wrong though. You're comparing a game of blackjack to a game of 40k. That's incorrect. You should be comparing a game of blackjack to an event in 40k - say, a shooting phase. A game of 40k is more akin to a few hours of blackjack, in which a good player can actually beat the house often enough to make it worth playing.

A good player can get more out of their shooting phase than a poor player, because in spite of the vagaries of dice, they will make better choices. That doesn't mean that every time a good player shoots the dice will work for them, or that the poor player cannot succeed when the dice come up in their favour.

In the case of 40k, though, sample sizes are way, WAY too small to see the effect of skill from relatively close-in-skill opponents. You only need to win roughly 4 games in a row to win a tournament. That's much to coarse to see small differences in player skill. Indeed, most people will never play a hundred games against a single opponent, and even then, those extra few wins could very likely be missed.

And yet, the same people win tournament after tournament. When your theory does not adequately describe the experimental results, you need to adjust your theory.

To think about it another way, a game of 40k is like playing blackjack against someone best two out of three. There is certainly player skill in knowing the odds, but it's still more or less the actual cards that come up in the games that determine the winner of that set. Over many, many sets, the skill difference will become apparent, but over a single game, or even over a few games, the coarsness of the system makes a mockery of any ability to determine which player is more skilled simply by looking at the outcomes of the game.

Again, you're comparing incorrectly. There are 3 phases per turn, and a minimum of 10 turns in the game. Add deployments to the equation, and a more realistic comparison would be which player had a better return (against the same dealer) out of 30-40 hands played. I'd side with the skilled player every time.

Xenocidal Maniac wrote:Then. Just. Quit.

So, your suggestion is that if someone doesn't like something, rather than making tweaks so that they can like it, they should just quit. How... mature. I don't see this approach doing much for the long-term survival of any hobby.

Xenocidal Maniac wrote:
Hi. I am one of the most decorated local players around competitively

Ooooh, decorated local player. Makeup? Put lipstick on a pig and it's still...

We don't bother decorating local players in Chicago. If you're good, you'll be decorated on the national or even international scene. (Alan B, for example, won both WargamesCon and the singles portion of the ETC)

Hi all,
FIRST, define what you mean by decent game?

If you want a well defined rule set suitable for tactical gamepaly. 40K 6th is NOT for you!

If you want to be able to measure your ability to compete in a meaningfull way.40K 6th is not for you!

If you want to be able to play a game without having JARRING conterintiutive gameplay.40k 6th is not for you.

IF you want to buy lots of GW product, pretend tons of randomness is 'fun' and make up 'house rules' to get the game play you want to have 'fun'.
40k 6th may be for you ...BUT why pay for a rule set you dont like as is?

In short if you like inspiration to buy GW minatures, but not actualy use the 40k 6th ed rules to play a game as written.
Then you MAY get a decent game of 40k from the 6th ed rules , IF you put lots of effort in...

I would rather spend my time and effort on something that delivers more in return...

"If you just want to play with 50-60 toy soldiers and a bunch of tanks with a few mates and some cider"... 40k 6th may still be for you.

@Lanrack

Sorry about not making it clear enough =O
what I meant was a decent game, in the sense that both opposing players have a (closest) equal chance to beating or even better in my opinion , tieing the other person in times of dire bad roles and such, without the huge influence of army list, in a little bit addition to terrain setup and house rules like some others have suggested and I have taken into account =)

*IN ADDITION little side note
Can't we all get along here and try and come up with ideas to help out the game
rather than pumbling each other into the ground over stupid cuting and pasting of
things said in prior post? xD

Xenocidal Maniac wrote:
Hi. I am one of the most decorated local players around competitively

Quoted Redangel:
Ooooh, decorated local player. Makeup? Put lipstick on a pig and it's still...

We don't bother decorating local players in Chicago. If you're good, you'll be decorated on the national or even international scene. (Alan B, for example, won both WargamesCon and the singles portion of the ETC)

Peregrine wrote:40k games tend to roll enough dice that it's fair to assume average results, and skill gives a meaingful advantage.

That is WAY not true.

The law of large numbers only exists for LARGE numbers. A few dozen die rolls is not large. Furthermore, not all die rolls are equally important. Narrow the scope down to the few events in a game that really, really matter, and now you're probably rolling a number of dice that can be counted on two hands.

You're trying to apply the law of large numbers to a relatively miniscule data set.

Redbeard wrote:And yet, the same people win tournament after tournament. When your theory does not adequately describe the experimental results

Yeah it does. People who win tournaments are lucky.

I've seen with my own eyes extreme luck happen to a single person over the course of several games. On many occasions. Given that you don't need extreme luck to win a game of 40k (you just need to have slightly better than your opponent), it is very, very well within the realm of reason that a single person has been mildly lucky over the course of a few dozen games.

40k is a game where you play odds. Better player skill means playing odds smarter. Who wins any given game is therefore the results of the actual specific instances of odds in any given game. Over the course of a tiny number of games each with a small number of odds events, it is therefore the results of the odds (the die rolls) that are what determine the outcome of the game and thus the tournament.

Unless your opponent always plays really awful odds, of course, but I think it's safe to say that people who fundamentally understand how the game works are unlikely to win tournaments (as they would need extremely good luck, rather than just mildly good luck).

 Ailaros wrote:

Peregrine wrote:40k games tend to roll enough dice that it's fair to assume average results, and skill gives a meaingful advantage.

That is WAY not true.

The law of large numbers only exists for LARGE numbers. A few dozen die rolls is not large. Furthermore, not all die rolls are equally important. Narrow the scope down to the few events in a game that really, really matter, and now you're probably rolling a number of dice that can be counted on two hands.

Yay!! Finally someone who is good at maths...

Lightcavalier wrote:
Really, you want to bring that up. The majority of us only have our local scene as a standard of comparison. As an example. There are not true national events in Canada, and for some reason we do not have an ETC team.

The nearest "major" 40k event to me is a 10 hour drive away on a good day. And where I live, most people dont have the money to be driving 10 hours to go play toy soldiers for a day and a half.
So you know what, lay off the guy. If he does well in his own setting, then its conceivable that he could do well in a larger scale. But saying that someone isnt credentialed because they, essentially, dont live near/attend any of the very large 40k events (which are localized to roughly 4 parts of the United States, as far as I can tell) is ridiculous.

Okay, let me spell this out so that you understand what I was really getting at.

There are a lot of people posting on this forum who do actually know each other from larger events. It's not about having the money or time to go there, it's about knowing each other. And, what's more, even if we don't know each other on sight, we recognize each other's names when we see them winning event after event.

So, when someone anonymously posts on the internet that I should just quit the game because I posted a critique of the 6th ed rules, I'm going to get a little short with him. And when he then goes on to say that he's a well decorated local player as a justification for his rudeness, well, according to who? One of my favourite quotes is from Margaret Thatcher, "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."

I'm not picking on anonymous internet guy because he's a local player, I'm picking on him because he's bragging about being a great "local player" on an international forum where many of the best players in the world participate without needing to toot their own horns in the same way, and he's doing it to justify his obnoxious comments, or did you miss those?

Someone who needs to brag about being a great local player probably isn't...

If the whole of Chicago acts the way you are in this thread, you know what I'm not doing next time im in town?

Well, since you already stated that you don't have the money to travel and play toy soldiers, my guess is that you wouldn't be playing toy soldiers...

I know not everyone is looking for the same thing out of a game, but it seems like some here are ascribing malice on the part of GW as the cause of their dislike, instead of a simple case of different expectations/goals on behalf of the design team.

Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I don't think GW has any malice, at all. I simply think that their rules design team is either completely befuddled by modern game design concepts, or ridiculously hamstrung by the needs of their sales teams. They continually miss the ball when it comes to balancing their factions. They're not willing to invest in actual game designers, preferring, instead, to internally promote translators and interns into design positions. You know there are college degrees in game design available these days...

Plenty of other game companies have proven that you can have a tightly defined ruleset and well-balanced mechanics and still appeal to casual gamers. GW, alone, seems to believe that if they tighten anything up, evil competitive people will abuse their rules and chase away casual players, not realizing that it's actually the imbalances that the competitive players recognize and abuse, and that hurt the casual player.

In an ideal world, a casual player could pick an army based on the fluff they liked and the models they wanted to paint and field a reasonable force. GW cannot make this happen. So when a newbie decides to play Tau because the models are cool, and proceeds to lose ten games in a row before quitting in frustration, it's not the competitive players who suffer.

And 6th ed was an opportunity to address some of these issues, and it was a missed one. Because, rather than actually address the flaws in the game, they decided to throw more random events in, so that Tau newbies could chance into a victory every once in a while. In the process, they crafted some of the worst gaming rules I've seen in over twenty years, resulting in a game where even laying out the terrain is turned into an antagonistic event (unless you create a house rule to deal with it), and hope that people whining about "TFG" will fix the problem. What they need to do is hire some of those TFGs and have them find these problems during playtesting, but that would actually involve playTESTING instead of PLAYtesting.

Ailaros wrote:

Redbeard wrote:And yet, the same people win tournament after tournament. When your theory does not adequately describe the experimental results

Yeah it does. People who win tournaments are lucky.

Well, I guess that's that then. Some people are simply charmed. They win tournament after tournament all due to being lucky. If only there was some way these individuals could channel their luck into something more lucrative than toy soldiers.

Seriously?

 Ailaros wrote:
The law of large numbers only exists for LARGE numbers.

Not true at all. While the outcome will not exactly converge on the mathematical average, it still comes pretty close. For example, let's consider a tactical squad shooting outside rapid fire range (10 shots, average 7 hits):

You have an 20% chance of less 6 hits, and a 10% chance of getting more than 8 hits. So you have a 70% chance of getting between 6-8 hits, which is pretty close to the average.

You have about a 2% chance of getting 3 or less hits or all 10 hits, which safely puts the extreme good and bad results into the "not very likely" category.


And once you consider the same squad shooting multiple times in a game, and then all of the games you play with a given list, you'll find that the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of your average results being pretty close to the mathematical average. Not exactly the average, of course, but close enough that the difference doesn't have much effect on your strategic choices or chances of winning.

Narrow the scope down to the few events in a game that really, really matter, and now you're probably rolling a number of dice that can be counted on two hands.

Exactly. This is why 6th edition's random factors are so stupid, because they involve single die rolls on completely unpredictable tables. It removes the predictable average outcomes of the rest of the game and replaces it with "on a 4+ you win".

40k is a game where you play odds. Better player skill means playing odds smarter. Who wins any given game is therefore the results of the actual specific instances of odds in any given game. Over the course of a tiny number of games each with a small number of odds events, it is therefore the results of the odds (the die rolls) that are what determine the outcome of the game and thus the tournament.

Exactly. 40k is a game where you play the odds, and enough dice are involved that you CAN play the odds and expect to succeed, on average. That's where player skill comes in: knowing what the odds are, and how to choose your movement/shooting targets/etc to pick the best way to roll dice. The same people tend to win tournaments because they're better at this, not because they have magical dice that always favor them.

And, like I said, you'll find a lot more room for player skill when you stop whining about WAAC and TFG. After all, it takes a lot of the skill out of the movement phase (for example) when moving anywhere but directly at the enemy is "abhorrent behavior" and you're a sociopath if you move to stay out of assault range and deny your opponent the fun of assaulting. When the only strategy is "move closer and throw dice" of course the game becomes about who is better with the dice.

Redbeard wrote:Some people are simply charmed. They win tournament after tournament all due to being lucky. If only there was some way these individuals could channel their luck into something more lucrative than toy soldiers.

Seriously?

Seriously. Of course, I would note that winning tournaments in 40k is no clear sign for success in other things. Other things in life are generally less plagued by uncontrollable variables, and just because someone is lucky at one thing doesn't make them lucky in another.

The transmission system for player skill in 40k (in most places) is through die rolls. Player skill is thus playing odds. Furthermore, the winner of any given event, and thus the aggregation of events (a game, or a tournament), is thus determined by the actual results of individual die rolls.

I've heard a lot of hate and wounded pride over the above set of statements, but without a different, better way of defining player skill and the way by which it transmits into the results of events, I really can't see a different, better way of looking at 40k in general, and thus a few handfuls of games in specific.

Peregrine wrote:While the outcome will not exactly converge on the mathematical average, it still comes pretty close.

Then you and your gaming group have very different luck than anything I've experienced. Outliers are much more common where I'm from.

For example, I've had the initiative seized on me in the last three games I've played (wherein I also got first turn). Recently, I had a 3x plasma vet squad take down an AV13 unwounded necron chariot with OVERWATCH. In the last game I played, my opponent rolled snakeyes for difficult terrain, recieved a "run" order on his guardsmen, and then rolled 3 more 1's, preventing him from getting onto an objective only 6" away. Twice in a row now, I've had a vehicle explode 6" from their first penetrating hit of the game (by Ap4 weapons no less). Last game I had 12 remaining conscripts throw down 8 hits for 6 wounds with their lasguns in a single round of shooting, which, thanks to wound allocation, left a squad out of charge range.

This is just SOME of the wonky stuff that's happened in just the last TWO GAMES. If you read my battle reports, you'll see that it is, in fact, very possible to have very rare events happen with surprising frequency. That's because the frequency is calculated based on an infinite number of events, not on the small number of them I've had over my years of playing 40k.

If you and your opponents are all relatively luck neutral (as in, things generally happen according to the statistical norm), then I envy you. I only wish the same were true for me.

I need to laugh.