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I always like to play it out. Sometimes the dice favour you and don't deliver the expected value. I used to play long shots just because people don't expect anyone to do anything irrational.

Wayniac wrote:

On a similar note there was a "drama" tournament ending I think a year or two ago now, I forget the tourney but it was the one where the final round, that was being live streamed I might add, a guy conceded because his opponent won the roll to go first and he wasn't able to seize. He immediately conceded the game (without playing a single round) and they spent a while talking about how the game would have turned out using mathhammer. No game was actually played, it was essentially two guys talking about a simulation of what would have absolutely (it's not like we're using dice, right?) happened and they both came to the conclusion that the guy who conceded would have lost anyway.

I think that says it all right there. That basically happened, albeit not with an app, in the final round of a major GT.

Was that in 8th or 7th? I seem to recall the latter.

While, I'm not a huge proponent of 40k as a tournament game, I will say that its matured rather dramatically in the last year. I don't feel like that would happen currently.

 LunarSol wrote:

Wayniac wrote:

On a similar note there was a "drama" tournament ending I think a year or two ago now, I forget the tourney but it was the one where the final round, that was being live streamed I might add, a guy conceded because his opponent won the roll to go first and he wasn't able to seize. He immediately conceded the game (without playing a single round) and they spent a while talking about how the game would have turned out using mathhammer. No game was actually played, it was essentially two guys talking about a simulation of what would have absolutely (it's not like we're using dice, right?) happened and they both came to the conclusion that the guy who conceded would have lost anyway.

I think that says it all right there. That basically happened, albeit not with an app, in the final round of a major GT.

Was that in 8th or 7th? I seem to recall the latter.

While, I'm not a huge proponent of 40k as a tournament game, I will say that its matured rather dramatically in the last year. I don't feel like that would happen currently.

It was the first nova after 8th dropped. That player has been... uh... censured for such things.

Like, this is just an excuse to hate tourney players though. "See, look, one's a gak, so they are ALL gaks!"

I mean, I can see it happening. I still wouldn't do it though. Like, I play a 3 Crusader list in tournaments. If I fight against Tau, unless I go first, I'm going to lose. If I go first, I'm probably still going to lose, but there's a chance at least.

Still wouldn't just quit, it's entirely possible my opponent just rolls like garbage.

stratigo wrote:

It was the first nova after 8th dropped. That player has been... uh... censured for such things.

One of the big pitfalls in edition changes is people taking the results of the first 6 months or so worth of tournaments as definitive. Any time the whole game changes like it did in 8th, the first tournaments are more about discovery what the meta is and what issues need to be patched. Honestly, I don't think there's much value in the first year or so, assuming the company behind it is looking to correct their early mistakes.

I think it wasn't that early, IIRC it was eldar soup vs. Castellan and friends. But it did leave a sour taste as far as making 40k into some sort of e-sport with paid sponsorships and "livable wages" from playing the game (which I don't think should be a thing anyways)

Wayniac wrote:
I think it wasn't that early, IIRC it was eldar soup vs. Castellan and friends. But it did leave a sour taste as far as making 40k into some sort of e-sport with paid sponsorships and "livable wages" from playing the game (which I don't think should be a thing anyways)

Is anyone ACTUALLY pushing for that, or is it just a boogyman you made up? I've never heard of anyone pushing for "livable wages" for 40k tournament players....

40k content creators though can absolutely get a livable wage from this game, but that's more because of the whole youtube / crowdfunding thing going on currently. A 40k content creator who happens to play tournaments could obviously make a living wage on that, but it's not nearly the same as an "e-sport" where you're on a team and the team pays you.

There's definitely people that would like to see it happen, but I think the streams themselves need to be willing to invest a lot more into their production values to make it really happen.

s anyone ACTUALLY pushing for that, or is it just a boogyman you made up? I've never heard of anyone pushing for "livable wages" for 40k tournament players....

I see it a few times a week in some form or fashion. It might not be a majority of the playerbase but its a very loud sub section.

 Horst wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
I think it wasn't that early, IIRC it was eldar soup vs. Castellan and friends. But it did leave a sour taste as far as making 40k into some sort of e-sport with paid sponsorships and "livable wages" from playing the game (which I don't think should be a thing anyways)

Is anyone ACTUALLY pushing for that, or is it just a boogyman you made up? I've never heard of anyone pushing for "livable wages" for 40k tournament players....

40k content creators though can absolutely get a livable wage from this game, but that's more because of the whole youtube / crowdfunding thing going on currently. A 40k content creator who happens to play tournaments could obviously make a living wage on that, but it's not nearly the same as an "e-sport" where you're on a team and the team pays you.

I've heard a good number of people pushing for it. On the AOS side, there's The Honest Wargamer, probably Ben curry and others. I haven't heard a lot on the 40k side but the latest Long War talks about how it's time to make that a reality and make 40k into a legit e-sport type phenomenon. I'm pretty sure Reecius would push for it as well but I haven't heard him specifically say it.

so I mean, there are people who want to push it. They want paid sponsorships for 40k, and like you find in other e-sports where people are able to make amazing money just by playing games.

Reese has said basically that in bols comments over the years.

I think there's potential in the direction, but it needs investment to actually turn into something profitable. Smaller points would help bring the runtime to something that people will watch for the duration and the presentation requires charismatic announcers filling the downtime. I can see it happening, though there will definitely be some controversy the first time you see an army with a Nascar style paint scheme.

 LunarSol wrote:
I think there's potential in the direction, but it needs investment to actually turn into something profitable. Smaller points would help bring the runtime to something that people will watch for the duration and the presentation requires charismatic announcers filling the downtime. I can see it happening, though there will definitely be some controversy the first time you see an army with a Nascar style paint scheme.

Or fluid rules interpretation, but much like MtG cheating on camera is fine if you're a 'name' or a favored GW shill

I think its inevitable that it will happen. The competitive direction has exploded over the past decade and its only getting bigger.

 Turnip Jedi wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
I think there's potential in the direction, but it needs investment to actually turn into something profitable. Smaller points would help bring the runtime to something that people will watch for the duration and the presentation requires charismatic announcers filling the downtime. I can see it happening, though there will definitely be some controversy the first time you see an army with a Nascar style paint scheme.

Or fluid rules interpretation, but much like MtG cheating on camera is fine if you're a 'name' or a favored GW shill

Any cheating caught on camera has pretty hardcore fethed the cheaters.

 auticus wrote:
I think its inevitable that it will happen. The competitive direction has exploded over the past decade and its only getting bigger.

I doubt it. The current state of competitive play is nowhere near enough to finance professional play, where professional play means making a salary of $50-75k a year minimum and not just making enough to fund your 40k hobby while living in your parents' basement. Even if you assume the best players will play in a tournament every week and win all of them you'd have to have multiple weekly events with cash prizes of $1500-2000 or more (remember, you have to pay your salary after covering hotel/travel/etc). Make more realistic assumptions about travel ability and how often "professional" players will win and you're looking at more like $10,000 or more as the minimum tournament prizes required. Right now we're still at the point where $100 store credit and a box of space marines is a pretty good prize.

 auticus wrote:
I think its inevitable that it will happen. The competitive direction has exploded over the past decade and its only getting bigger.

Totally unlikely. Professional 40kers make negative dollars when you factor in actual costs. We are no closer than we were a decade ago. Some people make money because of their personality and web presence not because of tournaments.

There's gotta be a 40k version with 'heretic' instead of 'okay.'

 Kirasu wrote:

 auticus wrote:
I think its inevitable that it will happen. The competitive direction has exploded over the past decade and its only getting bigger.

Totally unlikely. Professional 40kers make negative dollars when you factor in actual costs. We are no closer than we were a decade ago. Some people make money because of their personality and web presence not because of tournaments.

I think professional 40k would be more than just getting paid for winning tournaments. I think its a combination of things, as you note... personality and web presence and advertisement dollars.

There is a huge pool of people trying to be web celebrities these days for that very reason.

I mean, Nick Nanavanti is (was?) "sponsored" by the guy who runs Nights at the Game Table (Adam something, some independently wealthy dude), so there's that. Granted that's just one guy but it's along the lines of what people seem to want 40k to become; endorsements and sponsorships and people being paid to play.

Wayniac wrote:
I mean, Nick Nanavanti is (was?) "sponsored" by the guy who runs Nights at the Game Table (Adam something, some independently wealthy dude), so there's that. Granted that's just one guy but it's along the lines of what people seem to want 40k to become; endorsements and sponsorships and people being paid to play.

"sponsored" in 40k I think means people just pay your admission to tournaments. Jim Vesal and TJ Lannigan are "sponsored" similarly... I doubt they're making money enough to live on. They basically get to go to tournaments for free, because they promote their sponsor at the event. This is nothing like the esport thing, where people are paid potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. 40k will never have that... there's just way too few people who actually are interested in watching a game of 40k.

Nobody is going to get paid to play Warhammer 40k because Warhammer 40k is, like, the most boring thing to watch in the world. It's like the whole experience is waiting through your opponent's turn without having your own models.

They could jazz it up, to some degree, but competitive players are not about the spectacle and pageantry of the game. It might be possible to become a professional Golden Demon painter, because "look at this cool thing this very talented person did" is going to bring in a bigger audience than "this guy moved a bunch of models around on the table slightly better than the other guy".

You want to make 40k a professional thing - you do teams. A hobby guy and a player guy. Then you put the camera on the fething table rather than hovering 3 feet above it. Get some action angles that put you in the game. You overlay the dice rolls and game state changes on top of the screen, like how televised poker puts each player's hand up and the odds of drawing specific cards.

Then you find some players that aren't a bunch of mathhamer neckbeards. Ever hear GW staff on Voxcast talk about their models? They give them names and back stories. You want to see Sqorin Hammerfarf succeed, not generic Dwarven Skirmisher #3 of 8. You want to know how many battles that guy has been in, how many near deaths he faced, and how many times he's made the winning kill. You want to see when that model is finally retired and given a hero's send off. Give them some stats to follow. Make it about the army rather than just about the player.

You can play competitively all you want, but if you want to sell 40k as a spectator sport, you have to have something that people want to spectate. No spectators, no sponsors, no money.

Those are great things, if you assume that the market is non-competitive players and ignore the fact that these people are targeting a competitive audience that cares more about math than fancy character names. The real issues with 40k content being profitable have nothing to do with competitive vs. non-competitive preferences:

1) A game takes way too long. When a single game takes 2-3 hours you're going to really struggle to find anyone willing to sit down and commit to watching it. There's no short-format option where you can have a 15-30 minute broadcast and still have people get something out of it. This alone rules out everyone but the most dedicated fans as a potential audience and guarantees a lack of funding.

2) There's too much free content already available. What exactly is a "professional" content creator going to do that isn't already out there for free? How are they going to convince people to hand over their wallets? How do you deal with the fact that GW treats their content as advertising for the game and eagerly gives it away for free in an attempt to convince people to buy the real product? How do you compete with the people who have conventional jobs, can afford to treat 40k as a hobby, and give away free content because they don't care enough to try to monetize it?

 Peregrine wrote:


1) A game takes way too long. When a single game takes 2-3 hours you're going to really struggle to find anyone willing to sit down and commit to watching it. There's no short-format option where you can have a 15-30 minute broadcast and still have people get something out of it. This alone rules out everyone but the most dedicated fans as a potential audience and guarantees a lack of funding.

Sure there is. Just staying with in the GW product catalog, simply switch to Warhammer Underworlds, or maybe Kill Team, or whatever.

Underworlds matches are quick 10-20 minute things, on a much smaller board that is easily streamable and the game is actually designed for competitive style gaming (which 40K is not). Using hexes and cards also removes the imprecisions of tape-measure movement and ranges, etc..

You have all the ingredients there. And if you go beyond GW, I am sure there are even more good, possibly better options.

That´s the main problem IMO. These people want to make a "miniature wargaming e-sport", great!! But why insist on using the game least suitable for it? A game in no way, shape or form designed or intended for competitive e-sport style gaming?

There's no way I can see 40k becoming an e-sport or professional in the same way as something like StarCraft or even MtG. Peregrine's exactly correct, especially with point 1, which I see as the major barrier to making the game attractive to a wider audience.

Look at successful e-sports or MtG and you'll notice they generally have fairly short games. Sure, a StarCraft game might last for a relatively long time in some cases but they're generally over quickly enough to be within the attention span of even semi-interested viewers. If I'm sort of interested in 40k and check out a video of a "pro event" one of the main things I'm going to be turned off by is the length of the video. 2.5-3 hours for a single game is unworkable. That's before we get into the fact that streamed 40k right now looks terrible.

I think that's a partially solvable problem. WotC, for example, put a lot of effort into their MtG coverage to make things easier for the casual player. they've got decent camera angles set up beforehand, they've got graphics for displaying hands and individual cards and they've got knowledgeable commentators. Watching a tournament stream of a 40k game is painful at times. There's a lot of downtime and the commentators are often completely unsure about what's happening because it's difficult to keep track of a game as an outside observer not standing right next to the table. Even if you solve these issues the time investment to watch a game is too great, I think.

The only reason YouTube battle reports work, IMO, are because you can get a camera right up into the action and actually see what's going on. You can also edit out things like the movement phase which are incredibly dull to watch. Also, you get to hear from the players themselves rather than remote commentators.

There may well be GW games that are better suited to an e-sports format. The question then becomes do they have the pulling power to generate interest in a wider audience?

Those are valid points....today. GW has been pushing more and more killy games that get over faster and faster. I don't think its beyond the capacity for them to do a new edition with the goal being even faster games to get standard tournament games down to an hour or less. For the hardcore tournament organizers trying to create the world championships that is something else that they have to consider. For today that would mean moving formats down to lesser points to get the timeframe of games down so that you can stream the game and keep peoples' attention.

I think you're right. But I also think if GW are trying to get the average game time down a more satisfying way would be to reduce the model count rather than their current approach of increasing lethality to ridiculous levels. I don't think the time is the only issue, though. At the moment the visual spectacle of the game really doesn't transfer well to streaming, usually because camera angles are too wide and (in some cases) the armies on the table are unpainted or very badly painted. That may be solvable but it will need a lot of effort and set-up time from the streamers to fix.

From a company standpoint, reducing model count is a direction they'd avoid at all costs. Instead, increasing the lethality means tournament legal armies are still high model count (high $$$). Its in their best interest that way.

An overhead camera angle combined with a wide angle works well.

Typically the detail of models is not high enough on the stream for the paint job to matter, but tournaments enforcing painting solves unpainted models on their stream.

For me, the main barrier to miniature wargaming, board gaming or card gaming is the lack of anything interesting happening onscreen. In real sports, there's the action on the pitch/court/whatever. In e-sports, you're watching the screen(s) not the players. In televised 40k, you're watching an image where most of the time not much happens.

 auticus wrote:
From a company standpoint, reducing model count is a direction they'd avoid at all costs. Instead, increasing the lethality means tournament legal armies are still high model count (high $$$). Its in their best interest that way.

An overhead camera angle combined with a wide angle works well.

Typically the detail of models is not high enough on the stream for the paint job to matter, but tournaments enforcing painting solves unpainted models on their stream.

That lack of detail on stream is a problem, IMO. I don't think the overhead view works very well at all because it often makes it almost impossible to actually tell what you're looking at. At times you can't even tell where infantry-sized models are from that sort of view. Something that highlights unit positions in an overhead view would be good and this is the sort of thing I mean when I say there needs to be more work put into the streaming side of 40k if it's going to get more popular. Even the commentators often seem confused about what's happening because identifying units on the stream is such a problem.