bananathug wrote:
To keep in on subject, I like the rule of 3. I feel it does address the issue of skew and spamming units that GW is incapable of costing correctly.

My real problem is GW putting out such an imbalanced piece of gak codex of vanilla space marines vs those on the other end of the power spectrum (Eldar of all flavors, nids, guard, certain tau builds). I math-hammer the hell out of my options, work on the best synergies and at best I can offer my opponent a competitive game if they gimp their army.

Spoiler:

That's not fun for them or I and I think GW needs to take responsibility for putting out armies with such an imbalance of power (disentegrator cannon @ 15 points vs grav cannon @ 28 points....) instead of putting the blame on players who dare to take them.

Playing less competitive games, for my personal situation, means not playing games. I came back to 40k based on the marketing that this was going to be the most playtested version ever and naively believed that it would allow two strangers to build lists and go at it and at least have a reasonably balanced game (I mean so much of the game is tossing dice, there is so much chance involved that armies that are reasonably close should have some drama involved due to the outcomes being random). It really shows how out of balance the game is when even my dice are hot and my opponents are terrible the outcome is still never really in doubt...

I don't expect to win the LVO but it would be nice to be able to play against the semi-competitive lists at my FLGS on game night or attend the monthly tourney without feeling like I'm a point pinata for whoever gets lucky enough to play me.

I went from winning a couple tourneys at the beginning of 8th (index and then when SM were the only codex) to placing well (a win here or there) and then having games that I just could not win (reapers and shining spears) to now being happy to not get tabled (DE and eldar soup do it now, Tau given the right list/general stomp, Tsons before the deepstrike nerf were a problem). This all with my chasing the meta, buying the "best" available marine units, knowing my enemies lists, having a fair amount of tactical acumen, knowing the missions and being a relatively "smart" gamer (you know, "get gud").

For now I'm working on painting up the models that I like to paint. Doing a ton of basing (which I hate so I have plenty of work ahead of me) and trying my hand at some conversions while I wait for some sort of balancing from GW since the last two attempts made my personal experience worse. I enjoy these aspects of the hobby (as terrible as I am at them, gaining/improving a skill is always a fun personal challenge) and hopefully by BAO 2019 I'll have an army that I can show up with and not get laughed out of the building...

 blackmage wrote:
about all this talking about rule of 3... do you think they will fix rule of 3 for Dp's too or they intentionally left play more than 3 of them?

 techsoldaten wrote:

 blackmage wrote:
about all this talking about rule of 3... do you think they will fix rule of 3 for Dp's too or they intentionally left play more than 3 of them?

You mean, by taking a Chaos Space Marines detachment with 3 and by taking a Chaos Daemons detachment with 3, to have 6 Daemon Princes total?

 techsoldaten wrote:

 blackmage wrote:
about all this talking about rule of 3... do you think they will fix rule of 3 for Dp's too or they intentionally left play more than 3 of them?

You mean, by taking a Chaos Space Marines detachment with 3 and by taking a Chaos Daemons detachment with 3, to have 6 Daemon Princes total?

 Insectum7 wrote:
I wonder how much would change if they changed the rule of 3 to affect unit <Keyword> instead of dataslates. Like each Daemon Prince has the <Daemon Prince> keyword, iirc.

Andykp wrote:
perrigrine,

U are missing the point so much it’s funny. I DONT care if I win or lose. I want a fun game set in the universe and setting I have known for years and love. The idea of judging a list as “better” or worse is ridiculous to me. It baffles me how you can’t look at something from someone else perspective. I don’t play the same way as u. To me it’s a game, not a competion. If someone played well and beat me I applaud that. I used to play o-line in my younger days and loved a pancake and getting another one in the win column. Not in toy soldiers though. The story element is most important, characters and units are named and have histories and battles take place in a context. The list is a means to an end. It’s the cast, not the film. It’s not a moral high ground either. It’s just you sound very unhappy with the game. I’m not. I like it. It works for me. You are asking for the game to be changed to suit you but it would make it worse for me. That’s all. I’m not better or doing it right, I’m just happy with it at the minute.

And my fluffy list are so damn fluffy. It’s like a meme about unicorns from despicable me. They’re probably not as “good” as ones you can download but the are fun as heck and full of flavour.

bananathug wrote:
An army of mostly hellhounds (or whatever the FW version of them is) just won a GT this weekend.

Yep, rule of 3 really works well for curbing spam...

They won't nerf princes until an army of 12 wins a couple tournaments. Then they'll do something crazy which will really hurt the game for "casual" players (+100 points for all DPs...)

GW has little to no idea how their game really plays and is stuck in a knee-jerk reaction cycle to what players are "doing to their game." Conscripts, Fire-raptor buff then nerf, rule of 3, commander nerf, SM nerfs (multiple guilliman nerfs), Ynarri nerf, incoming DE buffs (I kid)...

Again, I like the rule of 3 but it's not solving the problem that GW thought it would (poorly designed/balanced units) but it does show that they are trying (which is something new for sure).

David Sirlin wrote:The derogatory term “scrub” means several different things. One definition is someone (especially a game player) who is not good at something (especially a game). By this definition, we all start out as scrubs, and there is certainly no shame in that. I mean the term differently, though. A scrub is a player who is handicapped by self-imposed rules that the game knows nothing about. A scrub does not play to win.

Now, everyone begins as a poor player—it takes time to learn a game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the game, one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game even before deciding which game to play. His problem? He does not play to win.

The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevents him from ever truly competing. These made-up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. Let’s take a fighting game off of which I’ve made my gaming career: Street Fighter.

In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.

You will not see a classic scrub throw his opponent five times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimizes his chances of winning? Here we’ve encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you—that’s cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that’s cheap, too. We’ve covered that one. If you block for fifty seconds doing no moves, that’s cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap. Street Fighter was just one example; I could have picked any competitive game at all.

Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is a tactic close to my heart that often elicits the call of the scrub. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. That is true by definition of playing to win. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing.

A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which one tries to win at all costs is “boring” or “not fun.” Who knows what objective the scrub has, but we know his objective is not truly to win. Yours is. Your objective is good and right and true, and let no one tell you otherwise. You have the power to dispatch those who would tell you otherwise, anyway. Simply beat them.

Let’s consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite subtle and difficult to discover. Knowing the counter tactic prevents the other player from using his tactic, but he can then use a counter to your counter. You are now afraid to use your counter and the opponent can go back to sneaking in the original overpowering tactic. This concept will be covered in much more detail later.

The good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.

Let’s return to the group of scrubs. They don’t know the first thing about all the depth I’ve been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more “fun.” Superficially, their argument does at least look valid, since often their games will be more “wet and wild” than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of this “fun” on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn’t nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent’s mind to such a degree that you can counter his every move, even his every counter.

Can you imagine what will happen when the two groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules.

The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a great deal about “skill” and how he has skill whereas other players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do not have skill. The confusion here is what “skill” actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is a sequence of moves that is unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take “skill,” according to the scrub. The “dragon punch” or “uppercut” in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a “skill move.”

jcd386 wrote:

Spoiler:

 MagicJuggler wrote:
All this talk about what competitive play actually is, what is "fair" and what actually is supposed to be "fun" really is bringing out the need to quote David Sirlin, just because you could swap out the Street Fighter for 40k and not too much changes.

David Sirlin wrote:The derogatory term “scrub” means several different things. One definition is someone (especially a game player) who is not good at something (especially a game). By this definition, we all start out as scrubs, and there is certainly no shame in that. I mean the term differently, though. A scrub is a player who is handicapped by self-imposed rules that the game knows nothing about. A scrub does not play to win.

Now, everyone begins as a poor player—it takes time to learn a game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the game, one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game even before deciding which game to play. His problem? He does not play to win.

The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevents him from ever truly competing. These made-up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. Let’s take a fighting game off of which I’ve made my gaming career: Street Fighter.

In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.

You will not see a classic scrub throw his opponent five times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimizes his chances of winning? Here we’ve encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you—that’s cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that’s cheap, too. We’ve covered that one. If you block for fifty seconds doing no moves, that’s cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap. Street Fighter was just one example; I could have picked any competitive game at all.

Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is a tactic close to my heart that often elicits the call of the scrub. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. That is true by definition of playing to win. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing.

A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which one tries to win at all costs is “boring” or “not fun.” Who knows what objective the scrub has, but we know his objective is not truly to win. Yours is. Your objective is good and right and true, and let no one tell you otherwise. You have the power to dispatch those who would tell you otherwise, anyway. Simply beat them.

Let’s consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite subtle and difficult to discover. Knowing the counter tactic prevents the other player from using his tactic, but he can then use a counter to your counter. You are now afraid to use your counter and the opponent can go back to sneaking in the original overpowering tactic. This concept will be covered in much more detail later.

The good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.

Let’s return to the group of scrubs. They don’t know the first thing about all the depth I’ve been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more “fun.” Superficially, their argument does at least look valid, since often their games will be more “wet and wild” than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of this “fun” on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn’t nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent’s mind to such a degree that you can counter his every move, even his every counter.

Can you imagine what will happen when the two groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules.

The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a great deal about “skill” and how he has skill whereas other players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do not have skill. The confusion here is what “skill” actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is a sequence of moves that is unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take “skill,” according to the scrub. The “dragon punch” or “uppercut” in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a “skill move.”

Great post. I agree with it, but I think that a lot of the time in 40k there are frequently issues with game balance that are not present in most other games due to it's complexity. Obviously GW has an idea of how they want the game to be played, and their changes ago to make the game reflect that.

I don't blame tournement players for one second for playing the most broken stuff, like taking 7 Hive Tyrants. But, I also want GW to keep tuning things to improve the game to be the way they think it should be. I think the rule of three is a good example of that.

 MagicJuggler wrote:
All this talk about what competitive play actually is, what is "fair" and what actually is supposed to be "fun" really is bringing out the need to quote David Sirlin, just because you could swap out the Street Fighter for 40k and not too much changes.

David Sirlin wrote:The derogatory term “scrub” means several different things.

 SHUPPET wrote:
Also, there's something immensely more satisfying about beating top tier characters with lower or mid tier or just swag characters, than there is about doing the opposite.

kombatwombat wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:
All this talk about what competitive play actually is, what is "fair" and what actually is supposed to be "fun" really is bringing out the need to quote David Sirlin, just because you could swap out the Street Fighter for 40k and not too much changes.

David Sirlin wrote:The derogatory term “scrub” means several different things.

A very interesting quote. It has led me to what I think really sums up ‘non-scrubs’: Peter Griffin playing Double Dribble. If you haven’t seen it, YouTube it, it’s only 90 seconds long.

https://youtu.be/bTaMRoAWrzY

If you sympathise with Peter Griffin, you’re not a scrub. If you align to David Sirlin’s point of view, I would say you are Peter Griffin.

In a tournament, it is sweet and right to be Peter Griffin. In that arena, we are all Peter Griffin, and the game is a challenge of who can slam the most corner 3s. In any game where the mutually agreed social contract is for competitiveness, it’s also cool. But if you’re doing as Peter is doing and spamming corner 3s outside of a competitive environment, then you are every bit as morally defensible as he is. Worse, if you blame Cleveland for not spamming corner 3s in that friendly environment, then you’re kind of beyond the help of mortal men.

I think David Sirlin actually hit on it perfectly: scrubs place stock in honour. To those who do put stock in honour, doing so needs no explanation. To those who don’t, I am immediately reminded of Bronn from Game of Thrones after winning a duel and being accused ‘You don’t fight with honour!’, to which he glances at the corpse and simply says ‘No. He did.’

 SHUPPET wrote:
As a big fighting game player, tbh many of us actually always found that quote from that SFII dev really dumb. It implies anyone who isn't picking the toppest tier character is playing poorly, or that self imposed rules are scrubby, or that winning with a low tier somehow makes you a scrub.

No, you aren't a scrub for character/race/army/hero/whatever you select. Scrubbiness is blaming your character or race for those losses. Also, there's something immensely more satisfying about beating top tier characters with lower or mid tier or just swag characters, than there is about doing the opposite. In a fighter, I'm very much aware every loss is my own fault, and attributing your choice in character for your loss at any level seems much more scrubby than just admitting your own play was responsible for your loss, 99% of the time.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Um what honor? You're playing a game with a clear objective, like any MTG or Monopoly game.

kombatwombat wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Um what honor? You're playing a game with a clear objective, like any MTG or Monopoly game.

Honour akin to facing an enemy in a duel rather than just shanking him in the kidneys when his back is turned, or coming across an enemy who only has a knife, lowering your rifle and drawing your own knife. I’m not sure I can explain honour; as I said, for those who value it, it needs no explanation, whereas those who do not simply go the Bronn of the Blackwater route.

 MagicJuggler wrote:
All this talk about what competitive play actually is, what is "fair" and what actually is supposed to be "fun" really is bringing out the need to quote David Sirlin, just because you could swap out the Street Fighter for 40k and not too much changes.

*wall of text*

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

I don't want to go the route of "it's a game", but when you're putting stock in honor in a game...that is silly. Just play the game do what you can to win.

bananathug wrote:
An army of mostly hellhounds (or whatever the FW version of them is) just won a GT this weekend.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:
As a big fighting game player, tbh many of us actually always found that quote from that SFII dev really dumb. It implies anyone who isn't picking the toppest tier character is playing poorly, or that self imposed rules are scrubby, or that winning with a low tier somehow makes you a scrub.

No, you aren't a scrub for character/race/army/hero/whatever you select. Scrubbiness is blaming your character or race for those losses. Also, there's something immensely more satisfying about beating top tier characters with lower or mid tier or just swag characters, than there is about doing the opposite. In a fighter, I'm very much aware every loss is my own fault, and attributing your choice in character for your loss at any level seems much more scrubby than just admitting your own play was responsible for your loss, 99% of the time.

If you really followed fighting games like you claimed you would say the quote was legit, actually.

 MagicJuggler wrote:
All this talk about what competitive play actually is, what is "fair" and what actually is supposed to be "fun" really is bringing out the need to quote David Sirlin, just because you could swap out the Street Fighter for 40k and not too much changes.

Spoiler:

David Sirlin wrote:The derogatory term “scrub” means several different things. One definition is someone (especially a game player) who is not good at something (especially a game). By this definition, we all start out as scrubs, and there is certainly no shame in that. I mean the term differently, though. A scrub is a player who is handicapped by self-imposed rules that the game knows nothing about. A scrub does not play to win.

Now, everyone begins as a poor player—it takes time to learn a game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the game, one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game even before deciding which game to play. His problem? He does not play to win.

The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevents him from ever truly competing. These made-up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. Let’s take a fighting game off of which I’ve made my gaming career: Street Fighter.

In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.

You will not see a classic scrub throw his opponent five times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimizes his chances of winning? Here we’ve encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you—that’s cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that’s cheap, too. We’ve covered that one. If you block for fifty seconds doing no moves, that’s cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap. Street Fighter was just one example; I could have picked any competitive game at all.

Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is a tactic close to my heart that often elicits the call of the scrub. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. That is true by definition of playing to win. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing.

A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which one tries to win at all costs is “boring” or “not fun.” Who knows what objective the scrub has, but we know his objective is not truly to win. Yours is. Your objective is good and right and true, and let no one tell you otherwise. You have the power to dispatch those who would tell you otherwise, anyway. Simply beat them.

Let’s consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite subtle and difficult to discover. Knowing the counter tactic prevents the other player from using his tactic, but he can then use a counter to your counter. You are now afraid to use your counter and the opponent can go back to sneaking in the original overpowering tactic. This concept will be covered in much more detail later.

The good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.

Let’s return to the group of scrubs. They don’t know the first thing about all the depth I’ve been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more “fun.” Superficially, their argument does at least look valid, since often their games will be more “wet and wild” than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of this “fun” on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn’t nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent’s mind to such a degree that you can counter his every move, even his every counter.

Can you imagine what will happen when the two groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules.

The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a great deal about “skill” and how he has skill whereas other players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do not have skill. The confusion here is what “skill” actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is a sequence of moves that is unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take “skill,” according to the scrub. The “dragon punch” or “uppercut” in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a “skill move.”

 techsoldaten wrote:

 blackmage wrote:
about all this talking about rule of 3... do you think they will fix rule of 3 for Dp's too or they intentionally left play more than 3 of them?

You mean, by taking a Chaos Space Marines detachment with 3 and by taking a Chaos Daemons detachment with 3, to have 6 Daemon Princes total?

 blackmage wrote:

 techsoldaten wrote:

 blackmage wrote:
about all this talking about rule of 3... do you think they will fix rule of 3 for Dp's too or they intentionally left play more than 3 of them?

You mean, by taking a Chaos Space Marines detachment with 3 and by taking a Chaos Daemons detachment with 3, to have 6 Daemon Princes total?

you can have more than 6 , chaos space marines, death guard, thousand sons, 9 at least, so i wonder if Gw will fix that or not