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I agree to with Auticus. At the end of the day the frustration comes when people with different mindsets about the game play together.

For me, a narrative guy going to a tournament with a bad list that loses and starts calling WAAC all the people is just as bad as a guy going to a casual-league for new players in a LGS with the most OP list out there and starts destroying new players. (I'll say the second one is worse, because new players are the blood of this hobby and they should be a protected species, but I have seen enough people that doesn't even care)

Pretty much auticus has it spot on. The community seems to want to focus on "optimal" and "competitive" type lists (individual communities might vary in this, but at least going from what's seen online, this is the most common scenario) so the people who don't want to do this have two choices, bsaically:

1) Be "forced" to optimize or play tournament type lists to not get crushed in a game (sometimes even not just tournament lists but not being able to play what they want)

2) Don't play the game

If you live in a hyper competitive area where almost everyone is playing optimally, you really get screwed if you want to lay a casual or even fluffy list because it just can't compete, and losing every game will quickly burn someone out especially when it's a lopsided exercise. It can be very hard to find like-minded people who are interested in narrative style play, and even if you find them it can ultimately become boring when you can only play against the same 4 people because everyone else plays optimal lists.

That's always been the disconnect in that a casual and a competitive player often can't play each other as they want completely different things out of the game, but far too often it's the competitive mindset that dominates, leaving the non-competitive players feeling bitter and left out because they have to either risk being bored with the game due to being essentially segregated, risk burnout by playing the competitive player with a non-competitive list and getting curbstomped, or "give in" and abandon the narrative stuff they enjoy to optimize just to have a fighting chance.

But Wayniac, what do the players do who play a fluffy army that also happens to be cheesy/beardy/win all the time?

They can't even hang out with the casuals, and their list usually isn't quite optimized enough to hang with the competitive people...

I do think 40k's imbalance is hurting both playstyles.

 Galas wrote:
I agree to with Auticus. At the end of the day the frustration comes when people with different mindsets about the game play together.

For me, a narrative guy going to a tournament with a bad list that loses and starts calling WAAC all the people is just as bad as a guy going to a casual-league for new players in a LGS with the most OP list out there and starts destroying new players. (I'll say the second one is worse, because new players are the blood of this hobby and they should be a protected species, but I have seen enough people that doesn't even care)

While this is true, another part of the frustration is that competitive players have their own event to do what they do i.e. tournaments. Most casual players know if they don't want to run optimal lists, then don't go to a tournament. However, the flipside is not true. There's nothing from preventing a competitive player from going to a casual event, such as a campaign or a league, and dominating with their optimal list (and some of the more TFG types enjoy doing this just to crush people). So this adds to the animosity between the two camps because the competitive player often has no qualms about going to a campaign with a min/maxed list, while the casual person isn't likely to turn up to a tournament and expect to do well.


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 Unit1126PLL wrote:
But Wayniac, what do the players do who play a fluffy army that also happens to be cheesy/beardy/win all the time?

They can't even hang out with the casuals, and their list usually isn't quite optimized enough to hang with the competitive people...

I do think 40k's imbalance is hurting both playstyles.

That problem is basically a game design flaw, because it exists at all. For instance, your superheavy tank company (I see where this was going ) is fluffy. It's also VERY powerful. This goes back to the "social contract" and putting the responsibility on the players to regulate themselves since the game will not. The onus should always be on the more powerful person to tone things down, rather than expect everyone else to "up their game", since you can often tone things down in such a way that it's still mostly fluffy. For example, if three superheavies are too much, maybe it's just one instead, and theme your narrative around that, and why this particular Baneblade is with another force and the other two are elsewhere fighting a different battle (or maybe being repaired, or whatnot).

Maybe it was just my experience with a great gaming group, but I never felt much of a disconnect between competitive and casual. Every game we played was played with the intent to win, and we always discussed ways to tweak certain choices within themes. The armies/fleets were mostly painted (exclusively painted with half the group or anyone playing with those people), on nice mats or purpose built sets with lots of painted terrain, and often opened every match with at least a blurb of why the forces are engaged and what they're fighting for.

That, to me anwyays, struck me as competitive (in it to win, looked to tweak lists to improve them and learn from the last game) and casual (story driven, beautiful armies, often mildly inebriated). All the players were happy to help anyone else in any and every aspect of the hobby. Armies were shared if you didn't have a painted force for the game, or simply wanted to try a different force.

Definitely a rare scenario, one I haven't found in the years since, but I don't think its impossible.

It helped that it was a university where 95% of the students lived on a small campus, so there's that.

Because of that group, I always play to win, and look to optimize my list within my own self-imposed thematic restrictions, but I prefer to play with at least some sort of story why our forces are fighting and live to play in lengthy campaigns with my own named commander who accumulates experience, or the force changes from losses.

But the game certainly could.

I used to play Armoured Company with 3 Baneblades, and that was fine. I got all excited when 3 Baneblades became a thing, and sold the Leman Russes to buy more Baneblades.

Now I'm committed to the army (though the collection's almost finished, so we'll see) - but it would never have been a problem in the first place if GW could decide how they want the game to function.

Unless how it is now is how they want it to function, but in that case, I think it's an ill-designed game.

IMHO one aspect is missing from the WAAC discussion.

In my very first game of 40k ever, I was playing the content of an assault on black reach box: 20 ork boyz, 5 nobz with no wargear, 3 koptaz and one warboss.

I was facing two scatter laser wave serpents loaded with farseers and destructor warlords and guardians with flamers, plus some artillery with blasts.

Boy, was that game fun.

Sometimes you simply need to tone down your army because the other person simply doesn't have the models to be competitive.

If you know about this in advance (my opponent did), I really see no good reason for stomping the guy who basically has 2x Dark Imperium as his army with dual daemon primarchs.

 General Annoyance wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
I go to the table looking what kind of interesting story scenario leads to this time.

Funny that winning isn't only goal available...

Irrelevant to the point I was making; no battle in history has been fought with the intention of losing/not winning - just because it's a narrative scenario does not mean that your game objective isn't being victorious.

Like I've been saying, this mentality about the perception of "playing to win" is very much flawed. Because if you're not playing a game to win it, you're throwing the game for all intents and purposes. The key point is to play to win, but not at the expense of the fun.

Curiou. You don't know me yet claim to know my mind better than i do.

Arrogant and false.

Seal clubbing, the case that shows that wanting to win doesn't necessarily mean you want to compete.

Wayniac wrote:
The onus should always be on the more powerful person to tone things down, rather than expect everyone else to "up their game", since you can often tone things down in such a way that it's still mostly fluffy.

This is badly wrong, because it makes the assumption that it costs the person with the more powerful list nothing to tone down their list. In reality it costs them extra money to buy more models to build a different list, extra time to build and paint those models, and it hinders their enjoyment of the game by forcing them to play with things they already declined to have any interest in using. You can't just assume that all lists are equally fun for the "competitive" player, therefore they should take on the entire burden of adjusting the power level of the game.

For example, if three superheavies are too much, maybe it's just one instead, and theme your narrative around that, and why this particular Baneblade is with another force and the other two are elsewhere fighting a different battle (or maybe being repaired, or whatnot).

And you could say the same thing about the lower-powered list swapping out units for something more powerful and still maintaining the fluff. Also, you're ignoring the fact that, with a list like this, a large part of the appeal is the sense of accomplishment in building an entire company. It's the same reason people build and play entire space marine companies according to the fluff organization. The person with a full space marine company wouldn't be very happy about being told that they should only bring eight squads, leave the other two at home, and bring some IG hordes to balance the game. Anyone can bring a single tactical squad, the pride of putting a full hundred-marine company on the table is the entire point of the game.

Now, there are certainly reasons to only take 1-2 Baneblades out of the company, but doing so is not a trivial thing from a fluff point of view.

^ This, basically.

GW screwed the pooch on things like Baneblade companies. I was overjoyed to learn they were playable in 8th, and when they went down 40 points, I was even more overjoyed because that meant I could mix up the list a bit with other stuff.

But unfortunately, they're also very powerful (though still apparently not tournament quality? I'm not sure if they've been seen in high-scoring tournament lists or not because I don't track that data. They certainly weren't in the index).

Furthermore, there's only so far they can discount the price to let lists be mixed up a bit before they have to start making them really really bad to justify the decreases, and I'd be okay with that from a design perspective but my fluffheart would break.

As for "casual at all costs", as the person (one of the people?) who started the term, it's a reference to the fact that self-declared "casual" players are often the exact opposite of what that word means. By the conventional definition a "casual" player is someone with a limited investment in the game. They have a general "meh" attitude to it, put very little time and money into it, doesn't care who wins, and probably wouldn't miss it very much if they stopped playing. But then you have self-declared "casual" players who spend thousands of dollars on models, obsessively craft a fluff story for every aspect of their collection, and then scream at their opponents for not being "casual" enough if they lose a game. That isn't a casual player, it's an extremely dedicated player who is a smug about how they have the One True Way To Have Fun and everyone else is doing it wrong. For this person "casual" is redefined to be about the power level of a list, with the assumption that a list which is bad at winning games is automatically more "casual", and a list that is stronger than theirs is automatically WAAC TFG CHEESE. Winning is extremely important to them, and they're entitled to win without ever changing anything about how they play because they already have the One True Way, and if you interfere with the wins they are entitled to then you are TFG. And this sense of entitlement is often accompanied by a terrible understanding of the rules and statistics. For example, their terminators have a 2+ armor save and awesome fluff, which means they should never die. If a terminator fails an armor save and dies then clearly it was WAAC TFG CHEESE that allowed this to happen, even when you put 10 wounds on the unit and the terminators rolled above average on their saves to only lose a single model.

TL;DR: CAAC is using "casual" as smug virtue signalling when you really care just as much about winning as the tournament players.

 MagicJuggler wrote:
Seal clubbing, the case that shows that wanting to win doesn't necessarily mean you want to compete.

I'll start to call the act of going to a league for new players with a ultra OP competitive list "Seal Clubbing", thanks

Stop talking about Baneblades Unit, don't derail a thread into your choices again

 Quickjager wrote:
Stop talking about Baneblades Unit, don't derail a thread into your choices again

In this specific case I think it's a useful discussion though, as it is an example of the extremes to which 40k armies can go within GW's chosen design space.

I could be talking about Knight armies if you'd prefer - it's the same story.

 Galas wrote:
I'll start to call the act of going to a league for new players with a ultra OP competitive list "Seal Clubbing", thanks

That's exactly what it's about: farming easy wins by targeting the weakest competition.

tneva82 wrote:
Curiou. You don't know me yet claim to know my mind better than i do.

Arrogant and false.

I have no idea where I claimed that I knew your mind better than you do, only that the mentality that playing any game with an objective to win without any intention of winning the game is detrimental rather than something that is good.

An example; you have a narrative scenario where you must hold off against an endless tide of Orks from your opponent for as long as you can. There is no way that you can win the scenario since you are outnumbered, and the structure of the game is that you are going to be wiped out eventually in a heroic last stand. Regardless, you play the game with the intention of destroying your opponent; if you didn't, then what you should be saying is "my forces are going to lay down their arms and get slaughtered by the approaching greenskins, because I'm not playing to win".

Whether you win any game, or if the game was set up for you to win or lose, is completely irrelevant - you play to win in that scenario. The exact definition of what playing to win is will vary depending on the game, be it competitive, narrative, or casual, but at no point in any scenario should you not be playing to win, unless it is at the cost of the overall enjoyment of the game, or in good sportsmanship.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Galas wrote:
I'll start to call the act of going to a league for new players with a ultra OP competitive list "Seal Clubbing", thanks

That's exactly what it's about: farming easy wins by targeting the weakest competition.

What do you call it when you suck at it? There's a guy like that at my store.

pm713 wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Galas wrote:
I'll start to call the act of going to a league for new players with a ultra OP competitive list "Seal Clubbing", thanks

That's exactly what it's about: farming easy wins by targeting the weakest competition.

What do you call it when you suck at it? There's a guy like that at my store.

An idiot.

 General Annoyance wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
Curiou. You don't know me yet claim to know my mind better than i do.

Arrogant and false.

I have no idea where I claimed that I knew your mind better than you do, only that the mentality that playing any game with an objective to win without any intention of winning the game is detrimental rather than something that is good.

An example; you have a narrative scenario where you must hold off against an endless tide of Orks from your opponent for as long as you can. There is no way that you can win the scenario since you are outnumbered, and the structure of the game is that you are going to be wiped out eventually in a heroic last stand. Regardless, you play the game with the intention of destroying your opponent; if you didn't, then what you should be saying is "my forces are going to lay down their arms and get slaughtered by the approaching greenskins, because I'm not playing to win".

Whether you win any game, or if the game was set up for you to win or lose, is completely irrelevant - you play to win in that scenario. The exact definition of what playing to win is will vary depending on the game, be it competitive, narrative, or casual, but at no point in any scenario should you not be playing to win, unless it is at the cost of the overall enjoyment of the game, or in good sportsmanship.

What if the objective of the scenario is to replicate a historical battle as well as possible? If you're playing as the French at Waterloo, you have to deliberately not march Marshal Grouchy's army northwards, as well as deliberately slowing down your own army's northern pursuit of the retreating and reforming Prussians to accurately model history. If self-limitation with the goal of losing a battle isn't "playing to lose" I don't know what is.

 Blacksails wrote:

pm713 wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Galas wrote:
I'll start to call the act of going to a league for new players with a ultra OP competitive list "Seal Clubbing", thanks

That's exactly what it's about: farming easy wins by targeting the weakest competition.

What do you call it when you suck at it? There's a guy like that at my store.

An idiot.

That does fit someone who ditched Eldar for losing too much. In 7th.

pm713 wrote:

That does fit someone who ditched Eldar for losing too much. In 7th.

Holy feth...yeah, definitely an idiot. Probably a stronger word that is filtered on this forum.

pm713 wrote:
What do you call it when you suck at it? There's a guy like that at my store.

Being hilariously terrible, and probably a TFG?


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 Unit1126PLL wrote:
What if the objective of the scenario is to replicate a historical battle as well as possible?

Then it's a pointless thing to do, and shouldn't be called a game. If your entire goal is to replicate history then what is the point of having rules? Just make a diorama of the battle, and move/add/remove models according to the historical script. The only reason to have a game at all with a historical battle is to take the basic parameters of the battle (terrain, participating forces, etc) and challenge the player to do better than the historical result.

 Peregrine wrote:

pm713 wrote:
What do you call it when you suck at it? There's a guy like that at my store.

Being hilariously terrible, and probably a TFG?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
What if the objective of the scenario is to replicate a historical battle as well as possible?

Then it's a pointless thing to do, and shouldn't be called a game. If your entire goal is to replicate history then what is the point of having rules? Just make a diorama of the battle, and move/add/remove models according to the historical script. The only reason to have a game at all with a historical battle is to take the basic parameters of the battle (terrain, participating forces, etc) and challenge the player to do better than the historical result.

I always assumed the premise of re-playing a historical battle was to truly grasp how close it was.

You would still use the adjudication method given by the ruleset for attacks, to see if it was essentially lucky or unlucky dice why the French won or lost, for example.

 Peregrine wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
The onus should always be on the more powerful person to tone things down, rather than expect everyone else to "up their game", since you can often tone things down in such a way that it's still mostly fluffy.

This is badly wrong, because it makes the assumption that it costs the person with the more powerful list nothing to tone down their list. In reality it costs them extra money to buy more models to build a different list, extra time to build and paint those models, and it hinders their enjoyment of the game by forcing them to play with things they already declined to have any interest in using. You can't just assume that all lists are equally fun for the "competitive" player, therefore they should take on the entire burden of adjusting the power level of the game.

For example, if three superheavies are too much, maybe it's just one instead, and theme your narrative around that, and why this particular Baneblade is with another force and the other two are elsewhere fighting a different battle (or maybe being repaired, or whatnot).

And you could say the same thing about the lower-powered list swapping out units for something more powerful and still maintaining the fluff. Also, you're ignoring the fact that, with a list like this, a large part of the appeal is the sense of accomplishment in building an entire company. It's the same reason people build and play entire space marine companies according to the fluff organization. The person with a full space marine company wouldn't be very happy about being told that they should only bring eight squads, leave the other two at home, and bring some IG hordes to balance the game. Anyone can bring a single tactical squad, the pride of putting a full hundred-marine company on the table is the entire point of the game.

Now, there are certainly reasons to only take 1-2 Baneblades out of the company, but doing so is not a trivial thing from a fluff point of view.

I generally do make the assumption that the person with the more competitive list has more of an onus to tone down if A) the intention is to have a several-hour, mutually enjoyable game that lasts for an afternoon, and B) i know that player has a large collection which they can use to create a list made up of only the ~10% of units that are competitive at any given time.

Yes, there exist players who go into the game with a very specific tournament focused mindset and only own the current tournament meta list at the time, and either ebay swap or quit when their collections become obsolete in a few months. But (despite what some people will have you believe) that type seems to be a minority to me. I find it much more common to see a player who owns, for instance, pretty much everything in the space marine range with a heavy emphasis on whatever is competitive at the moment. He's probably got his arms magnetized because he's a forward-thinking competitive gamer and he knows in six months maybe those grav guns are going to want to be melta guns or plasma guns.

That kind of guy? Yeah, if he meets requirement A) (and usually if its just a regular weekend of chill gaming) I'm probably going to expect him to be toning his list down, especially if his opponent has a limited collection or is new.

Everything is circumstantial. Yeah, the guy who owns a vast collection but plays against a dude with exactly 2000pts and whines that he's a WAAC TFG when he beats him with a slightly more competitively minded list is a jerk. But I find it an overwhelmingly more common situation where a longtime player is uncomfortable with swapping a few magnetized weapons around and bringing less crunch focused armies to normal gaming days because he's uncomfortable with the prospect that he might lose a game to a newer player or someone he views as "less good at the game".

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

pm713 wrote:
What do you call it when you suck at it? There's a guy like that at my store.

Being hilariously terrible, and probably a TFG?


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 Unit1126PLL wrote:
What if the objective of the scenario is to replicate a historical battle as well as possible?

Then it's a pointless thing to do, and shouldn't be called a game. If your entire goal is to replicate history then what is the point of having rules? Just make a diorama of the battle, and move/add/remove models according to the historical script. The only reason to have a game at all with a historical battle is to take the basic parameters of the battle (terrain, participating forces, etc) and challenge the player to do better than the historical result.

I always assumed the premise of re-playing a historical battle was to truly grasp how close it was.

You would still use the adjudication method given by the ruleset for attacks, to see if it was essentially lucky or unlucky dice why the French won or lost, for example.

To me the point of refighting a historical battle is to see what different things might have affected the outcome. E.g. if historically the relief army didn't get there in time, what might have happened if they did? What if XYZ happened differently. There's a huge appeal in historical gaming and has been for 30+ years now that revolve round that; never forget that the original gestation for wargaming like Warhammer came from historical wargaming like Napoleonics and such, in fact many of GW's original designers had that background.

My issue with Peregrin's statement regarding the non-competitive player to bring a more competitive list is, quite frankly, it stinks of "git gud". It's basically telling the person who likes Necrons to go pick a different army that's better so they don't get curbstomped, rather than maybe, just maybe, not bring 100% "optimized" lists to every game. "Git gud" doesn't belong in 40k in my opinion. While you shouldn't be able to just pick random units together, you shouldn't have it where someone always brings guilliman and razorback spam, and someone wants to really play necrons which can't compete at all, and then have the balls to tell the person that they should have picked a better army instead of maybe not bringing guillian and razorbacks.

Wayniac wrote:
To me the point of refighting a historical battle is to see what different things might have affected the outcome. E.g. if historically the relief army didn't get there in time, what might have happened if they did? What if XYZ happened differently. There's a huge appeal in historical gaming and has been for 30+ years now that revolve round that; never forget that the original gestation for wargaming like Warhammer came from historical wargaming like Napoleonics and such.

Sure, but in that case you're still setting up the parameters of the scenario ("battle X, but if Y happened differently") and then trying to win the game. You aren't scripting out the outcome of the game and then making all of your choices based on the script. You aren't making deliberate bad decisions once the game begins just because making the smart play would lead to an outcome that doesn't match the historical one.


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 Unit1126PLL wrote:
I always assumed the premise of re-playing a historical battle was to truly grasp how close it was.

You would still use the adjudication method given by the ruleset for attacks, to see if it was essentially lucky or unlucky dice why the French won or lost, for example.

That seems like a rather pointless exercise when the choice of rules for the game are going to have such a significant effect on the outcome. Whether your resolution requires a 3+ or a 4+ is completely arbitrary, but can swing the outcome of a fight. All you're going to learn is how your chosen rules function when you apply them to a specific script of actions, a question that has very little to do with history.


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the_scotsman wrote:
Yes, there exist players who go into the game with a very specific tournament focused mindset and only own the current tournament meta list at the time, and either ebay swap or quit when their collections become obsolete in a few months. But (despite what some people will have you believe) that type seems to be a minority to me. I find it much more common to see a player who owns, for instance, pretty much everything in the space marine range with a heavy emphasis on whatever is competitive at the moment. He's probably got his arms magnetized because he's a forward-thinking competitive gamer and he knows in six months maybe those grav guns are going to want to be melta guns or plasma guns.

You're focusing entirely on the extreme end of power level, in a game where balance issues exist at all levels. For example, I have a smallish collection and don't play with unpainted models, so expanding it isn't easy. That collection is heavy on LoW-type units, with a fairly limited core of "normal" units to support them. And changes to various units have made some of them either illegal or so hopelessly weak that they might as well not exist anymore. So I have some flexibility in which LoW I bring, but it's still going to be essentially the same list. It's not an exceptionally powerful list, in a tournament context, but if I'm in a position where I'm bringing a significantly more powerful list than my opponent I have very little room to make power level changes without doing blatantly stupid things like "forgetting" to put special weapons in my veteran squads. But by Wayniac's argument I, as the player who has done more list optimization, have the entire obligation to go out and buy new units to make a weaker list while my opponent has zero obligation of their own to make a more powerful list that can compete with mine.

I don't agree with Wayniac here. Putting "always" in front of an assertion is probably the best way to be wrong unless you're a mathematician.

There is, however, a fairly obvious correlation between how long someone has been playing and how many models they have in their collection and how well they know the ins and the outs of the rules.

I'd say the onus is most often on whoever has the bigger collection to change their list if there's a mismatch. I will tone my list up and down according to my opponent in pretty much any game because I have a huge shelf filled with painted models accumulated over 15 years of playing pretty much continuously. My objective in any game is to win, but with the game as close as humanly possible and making the most solid use of the four hours a week I get to game as possible. I will 100% make particular inefficient decisions or put restrictions on myself to achieve that goal, because I'm the kind of person who will play games in a weird, inefficient way to get more of a challenge out of them (playing fallout trying to use only my fists, playing Empire Total War and roleplaying myself as the Only Elephants Faction, etc)

The other option when you're in a situation where someone's list is more powerful than the other is just...play an imbalanced game, or don't play each other. Sometimes you want to get out and just push some models around. Sometimes your goals are just incompatible and you'd be better off getting different opponents.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, balance issues are vastly less prevalent outside the best or worst 5% of options in the game. I have played games where my opponent and I chose our armies via a completely random predetermined sequence we came up with, where you randomly determine a unit to use, then randomly determine their wargear, and they usually end up fairly balanced because it's just total chaos and everything is inefficient.

I think ultimately the issue is this.

1) If two non-competitive (I like this term instead of "casual") players play each other, it will probably be a good game.

2) If two competitive players play each other, it will probably be a good game.

3) If a non-competitive player and a competitive player play a game, one or both parties are likely going to not have a good game and walk away feeling like they just wasted time.

#3 is where all the issues come from, because both groups are within their right to enjoy the game as they see fit but when they interact with each other, SOMEBODY (or both people) has to give up some ground to compromise, otherwise neither of them are having fun.

I often wonder if one of the issues is that people seem to rather have an unfun game than no game at all. Ergo, you tend to see a non-competitive person accept (I deliberately chose this term instead of "agree") playing against a competitive player, and then later feeling dejected because they got tabled turn 2 or whatever unfun experience they hda, or you see a competitive player accept a game against a non-competitive player and later feel like they didn't have any sort of challenge at all, rather than both of them realizing that hey, Bob is playing a competitive list and Steve is playing a fun/janky/fluffy list, this is probably not going to be a fun game for either of us and not play each other.

the_scotsman wrote:
There is, however, a fairly obvious correlation between how long someone has been playing and how many models they have in their collection and how well they know the ins and the outs of the rules.

But knowing is only part of the situation. Most of the time the issue with entitled "casual" players and the asymmetrical obligation isn't dealing with a clueless newbie who is still trying to figure out how the rules work, it's an experienced player who has had plenty of opportunities to learn the game but deliberately chooses to bring a weak list (whether out of strict adherence to fluff or virtue signalling about how "casual" they are). Very few people have any objection to toning down a list when giving a newbie a learning game.