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Right now, Combat Patrol provides the greatest separate play mode. It is isolated from all of the other ways to play.

In 9th, Crusade was far more separated from Matched play- none, or very few, of the rules updates throughout the edition applied to Crusade. Can't have two subfactions in the same army? Never applied to Crusade. Flyer limits? Never occurred in Crusade. Rule of three? Not in Crusade.

But now, every update applies book wide, so only Combat Patrol remains insulated from the "Oh, It's Thursday, so everything has changed and now I have to rebuild every army list" phenomenon.

Yet another thing I like less about 10th than I did 9th.

 vict0988 wrote:

Spoiler:

Wayniac wrote:
ITC rules weren't even good. They were boring, symmetrical, bland, and their secondaries put all the "tactics" into list building, literally letting you build lists to min-max what secondaries you were picking and what your opponent could pick.

And hey, surprise, surprise, that's basically what 8th and 9th edition tournaments were entirely.. 10th too, but at least the Leviathan deck has SOME interesting flavor... many of which still get ignored by tournaments (like a lot of the Mission Rules).

It's almost like GW learned the wrong thing from the fiasco in 7th, and felt that the tournament crowd was the biggest because they are the loudest thanks to forums/Youtube, so figured hey we need to listen to these guys rather than stop being arrogant douchebags and putting out garbage rules.

Not wanting to get political but it's almost a Warhammer version of "get woke, go broke" where the loudest group crying for change is also the smallest but LOOKS like they're the largest thanks to social media and so the company listens and changes for them, and then alienates their REAL fans as a result.

What rules do you want to asymmetrical? Faction secondaries?

How can you align the belief that everybody wants to play competitively with GW listening to competitive players being wrong? Why should they listen to a fringe part of the community that wants 4th edition style missions and randomised asymmetrical terrain and random army sizes for everyone, including those that don't want it? How about the flood of narrative content GW have produced since the start of 8th?

The random roulette mission decks where you combine different things produce flavourless and horribly balanced missions, especially the stupid mission deck from 8th/9th that so many on Dakka love. ITC really helped curb a lot of OP lists which created more faction diversity at times where the game was broken, if GW hadn't reacted as fast as they did to SM2.0 it would have been up to ITC to fix that turd as well, un unhappy coincidence of SM2.0 playing into the ITC rules at the time of release made ITC rules bad for a brief moment, but to a pointless degree since SM2.0 were firmly broken in GW's Russian roulette mission pack with secondary missions being generated every turn as well. What could be more stupid for a tournament than randomly generating secondaries every turn? Americans had it right when it came to tournaments, they just need to play a casual game once in a while and not try to get everyone into the competitive environment.

ITC lists had a tendency to reduce risk and input in-game by winning during list construction.

2000 point standard games? Comes from pre-ITC trend of not wanting to have "gaps" in the army.

ITC lists largely were constructed with specific secondaries in mind to maximise their own and minimise how many can be given up in turn. This leads to the game being "solved" largely before play.

Many of the secondaries, the most popular in particular, were passive or owning player controlled. This was because if you reduce interactivity using your "solved" army, you can maths out points with piecemeal trading units.

There was a lack of emphasis on reacting to in-game variables, or changing environments, which is why those card packs were praised. You won not because your opponent couldn't kill more than X characters, horde units or vehicles, but based on your armies ability to move and react.

It's not to downplay their achievements of creating a widely accepted rules set for tournament play. As noted, many of the above traits exist in today's game. But what they did create was a game that was built off simple maths you could generally calculate pregame.

This is admittedly from someone who did not play ITC but did watch plenty and soak up plenty of resources about the US game in 7th/8th. My opinion and thoughts are anecdotal.

GW started pandering to the ITC crowd because the ITC put the money where their mouth was and managed to get large amounts of people to adopt their rulesets as standard.

Had they ignored it chances are ITC would keep growing and diverging until GW had little control over the rules of their own game.

 Tyran wrote:
GW started pandering to the ITC crowd because the ITC put the money where their mouth was and managed to get large amounts of people to adopt their rulesets as standard.

Had they ignored it chances are ITC would keep growing and diverging until GW had little control over the rules of their own game.

I still think that would have been preferable to allowing an outside entity to dictate changing your rules based on an incredibly vocal minority who loves to shout down all dissenting opinions.

It worked fine for 25 years.

And it wasn't working then. We do have to remember this was paired with GW's troubles during 7th that saw them losing money.

 Tyran wrote:
And it wasn't working then. We do have to remember this was paired with GW's troubles during 7th that saw them losing money.

I'm pretty sure not making the game tournament-focused, despite ITC and competitive players thinking that was the reason, had anything to do with the problems in 7th. I swear, that happened at the worst possible time because it really made the comp crowd think that GW was literally failing due to not making the game for them, and then 8th revitalizing it was sort of a "See, it's true! Now they're listening to us comp players and they're a success!" moment, and ruined everything.

Is it a minority though? How else would GW get to know that maybe with not everyone playing eldar in w40k, their rule set is generating some adverse feelings as far as fun and 10th ed goes? Or the same for bad factions. How is GW suppose to be notified that they dropped the ball on a faction, other then to see that no one is playing it. In AoS , as flawed a game as it is, it helps a lot that GW can just see which scrolls are used, which aren't, what the win rates are both in general and in specific match ups.

It doesn't help the people playing around the world to know, that if someone plays the odd "narrative" driven games, that GW favours, certain armies aren't impossible to beat.
It took GW 3 years and a DT member to actualy see it with his own eyes, to understand that maybe double dip kill secondaries aren't good in 9th ed. They had zero problems with swarms of flyarants, till they saw how the army plays. It is not the worlds foult that GW plays w40k in most fringe way imaginable. AoS has a ton of event players on the design team, not the test team, and the rules are a lot better. While of course not perfect and still GW in style.

Wayniac wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
GW started pandering to the ITC crowd because the ITC put the money where their mouth was and managed to get large amounts of people to adopt their rulesets as standard.

Had they ignored it chances are ITC would keep growing and diverging until GW had little control over the rules of their own game.

I still think that would have been preferable to allowing an outside entity to dictate changing your rules based on an incredibly vocal minority who loves to shout down all dissenting opinions.

It worked fine for 25 years.

A vocal minority that somehow managed to make most of the US play their way... Doesn't pass the smell test. The silent majority that wants to play roulette missions just doesn't exist, find the handful of people in your area who wants to play that way but stop trying to make us believe that everyone wants to play with dragon attacks that determine the game more than player decisions and relic missions which create tonnes of unwinnable matchups. Prove that a loud minority can change how everyone plays, make your state mainly play the 4th edition missions, shouldn't be a challenge at all since it's proper GW rules and not overhyped homebrew or whatever you want to call ITC.

And we still see that these days.

Crusade actually has a surprisingly amount of asymmetrical missions, including an "the attacker must start off the table" one.

Most people don't play crusade missions though.

 vict0988 wrote:

Wayniac wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
GW started pandering to the ITC crowd because the ITC put the money where their mouth was and managed to get large amounts of people to adopt their rulesets as standard.

Had they ignored it chances are ITC would keep growing and diverging until GW had little control over the rules of their own game.

I still think that would have been preferable to allowing an outside entity to dictate changing your rules based on an incredibly vocal minority who loves to shout down all dissenting opinions.

It worked fine for 25 years.

A vocal minority that somehow managed to make most of the US play their way... Doesn't pass the smell test. The silent majority that wants to play roulette missions just doesn't exist, find the handful of people in your area who wants to play that way but stop trying to make us believe that everyone wants to play with dragon attacks that determine the game more than player decisions and relic missions which create tonnes of unwinnable matchups. Prove that a loud minority can change how everyone plays, make your state mainly play the 4th edition missions, shouldn't be a challenge at all since it's proper GW rules and not overhyped homebrew or whatever you want to call ITC.

As far as I know, GW doesn't publish information that would allow anyone to make an informed statement.

I'm going to assume that the UK has the highest player base per capita, but I don't know about absolute numbers. With a world wide hobby, it certainly is possible for a loud minority to influence the dominant playstyle in the US, because on the world stage, all of the US is a minority. There are 400 million 'Mericans. There are 7.6 billion of everyone else. If every single customer in the US wanted tournament play only, that could still be a minority of players on the world stage.

Having said that, however, the US is one of the world's largest economies, and likely the largest in which 40k is played in significant numbers. And it IS possible that the US has a disproportionate share of both unique customers and total dollars spent.

Comparing these numbers with the number of people who play in tournaments is the only way to really be sure about who the global majorities and minorities may be.

What I can tell you as a Canadian is that up here, I'm not aware of any "National Level" tournaments. There's probably some sort of tournament scene in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, but even as Canadians, we don't hear abut them if they exist at all. In my country, the home circle gamer probably IS the majority, and we certainly are in my city. Our marketplace is also only 40 million strong, so on the world stage we don't really influence the hobby at all.

As with most discussions, people tend to argue ferociously from their own perspectives without considering big picture ideas- myself included. Almost everything is more complicated in real life than we make it sound on Dakka.

I'm of the opinion ITC was more a result of GWs reluctant approach to updates and FAQs pre-8th Edition. So the community took that in their own hands and with 8th ITC wasn't relevant anymore over night.

I never understood why GW felt the need to streamline the missions ITC style, 8th had the best missions overall. You had matched play missions with progressive scoring that got an update once per year in CA, you had the open war deck which worked okay, you had maelstrom, you had cities of death missions and additional campaign missions like Vigilus. With 9th everything that was left where highly abstracted matched missions, yes, even crusade overall had mostly the same symmetrical and abstracted missions. A 9th edition Mission where you defended a convoy or civilians against an enemy attack didn't give you a datasheet for a convoi truck or for a generic group of civilians and how they move, behave when the enemy comes closer and where they try to run to, no, your highly valuable civilians are a circle on the ground, an objective just like in any other Mission.
This, people, is where I'd agree that "soul" was lost.

Kinda?

I do get the criticism of ITC. But I also understand “well that seems to work, let’s just use that” decision from GW.

For those of us who aren’t fussed for competitive play? We’re still completely free to cobble together our own missions and rules as we see fit.

For me, I’m ok with a more streamlined game for general meetup and play, but feel the system just lacks so much for a more narrative experience. Therefore I will probably play a hybrid of 9th and 10th. Keep current 10th rules and strats etc, but reintroduce psychic disciplines (performed in command phase unless a “shooting” attack), litanies, warlord traits and relics, etc. This will probably work better in a crusade system because I can’t stand the current era of “heirloom” weapons.

 vipoid wrote:
If you don't mind me asking, what are you using for all the different base tables you have? Are they mats with images on that you lay over the table, or do you have a ton of different squares that go together to form them?

Most of them are 6x4 mats, some double side, and all form Gamemat.eu. The stuff you see under the city table was from a Kickstarter that is 4 tiles that make up a 6x4 table, and they can be spun around and moved around to create different combinations.

 vipoid wrote:
For example, while the psychic system in 8th and 9th could be a bit bland (how many ways to we really need to inflict d3 mortal wounds? ), it still worked well in removing the worst excesses of the 7th edition magic system. However, 10th then slapped it into the ground for no discernible reason.

It's just GW learning the wrong lessons and overbalancing things as they always do.

Even now, part of the problem is that people will refuse to play things not Leviathan, or cite them as not being "real" 40k. Even things like Crusade, or the Bunker missions they have been publishing in white dwarf (four of them now, all of them are based on the Open War mission in the core rules so no secondary objectives but interesting twists or additions for VP, like one of them certain objectives give a 5++ save, another if your warlord dies your whole army needs to take Battle-shock, very interesting missions that aren't just Leviathan stuff), people immediately start bitching that you "need" secondary objectives to have a balanced game, which IMHO just sounds like ITC propaganda bullgak that has bled into the masses.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

I never understood why GW felt the need to streamline the missions ITC style, 8th had the best missions overall.

Because Mike Brandt and Reecius wouldn't use them, nor would their competitive cultists, which meant the average player also wouldn't use it because "if its good enough for competitive players, its good enough for everyone else".

And yes, it is 100% the problem of a vocal minority dictating the rules to the wider community. There are approximately 700k members on the warhammer 40k subreddit for example, but the latest metawatch article is based only on 60k games logged since the balance dataslate dropped on July 9th. I shouldn't have to explain to you the math there, that 700k probably makes up 20% of the global 40k playerbase I would guess, so you're talking about 3.5 million players worldwide, and you expect me to believe that collectively they have only played 60k games over the past 3 months total? That basically means that 120,000 players played a single game in 3 months and the other however many million didn't touch the game at all. Thats ludicrous. And the fact of the matter is that for most of us here, none of the games we have played in that timeframe are being logged, because most of us are not active tournament players registering our games with BCP or ITC. Also look at the warhammer competitive subreddit, about 110k members, so the competitive player reddit is about 15% of the size of the broader 40k reddit - and warhammer competitive includes AoS and 30k players, so the actual 40k competitive playerbase is arguably even smaller. And a lot of the people on warhammer competitive are players that don't actually play tournaments, they are just players motivated to win and keep up with the meta to give themselves a competitive edge. A quick perusal at the BCP database indicates that theres a total of just under 20k ITC ranked players and 37k BCP ranked players for 40k worldwide, for example, so the actual competitive (ie tournament going) 40k playerbase is actually quite small in the context of the hundreds of thousands or even millions of players that we expect to exist... but the rules are increasingly catering to that group of lets say 40,000 players and forcing the other 3.4 million or so I've estimated to play their way.

How would you go about gathering data from non-tournament games?
Genuine question.

That big survey GW does seems to show year after year that casual play at home or a local club outweighs any competitive play.
People who don't play games outnumber casual players as well.
The majority of Warhammer hobbyists aren't even in it for the games just the models.

Apart from that there is no way to gather hard data the way it can be done with tournaments, which is one of the issues. It's not so much a case of the "loud minority" but rather those who attend tournaments and generate discussion of the game in a more in-depth way are really the only people actually talking about it purely due to the nature of casual players.
If you get maybe a game a month, you aren't going to notice the wombo combos or broken units as much, if ever, compared to people who play all the time at tournaments.
Folks I work with who are into the hobby are like me, they buy things because they're cool not because they're meta so they wouldn't take part in a 30-page forum thread about the positives and negatives of a given army or spend hours scouring Reddit for the best options to win games because it literally doesn't matter to them.

 JNAProductions wrote:
How would you go about gathering data from non-tournament games?
Genuine question.

I wouldn't. But I also wouldn't use tournament data as the only metric for balancing, especially since those people will always find the OP combos and abuse them, so trying to fix it is a futile effort as they just move onto whatever is next, they never "learn" not to do it in the first place, so GW constant chasing them every few month does nothing but shake up the game for everyone else, invalidate codexes before they ever come out, and in general make it hard to find half the rules anyway.

Where tournament data should help is identifying actually broken things (e.g. Titanic, Eldar) and, if it's showing that the factions have an acceptable win rate but then you look and it's like 1-2 lists that are viable, identifying what should be corrected to fix that. Instead they act like a 55% win rate is something to be proud of, and comp players will say look how great the balance is we have 8 factions all within 3% win rates or whatever crap, but then you see each of those factions are being propped up by one "meta" list and that's it. So it's IMHO useless.

chaos0xomega wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:

I never understood why GW felt the need to streamline the missions ITC style, 8th had the best missions overall.

Because Mike Brandt and Reecius wouldn't use them, nor would their competitive cultists, which meant the average player also wouldn't use it because "if its good enough for competitive players, its good enough for everyone else".

And yes, it is 100% the problem of a vocal minority dictating the rules to the wider community. There are approximately 700k members on the warhammer 40k subreddit for example, but the latest metawatch article is based only on 60k games logged since the balance dataslate dropped on July 9th. I shouldn't have to explain to you the math there, that 700k probably makes up 20% of the global 40k playerbase I would guess, so you're talking about 3.5 million players worldwide, and you expect me to believe that collectively they have only played 60k games over the past 3 months total? That basically means that 120,000 players played a single game in 3 months and the other however many million didn't touch the game at all. Thats ludicrous. And the fact of the matter is that for most of us here, none of the games we have played in that timeframe are being logged, because most of us are not active tournament players registering our games with BCP or ITC. Also look at the warhammer competitive subreddit, about 110k members, so the competitive player reddit is about 15% of the size of the broader 40k reddit - and warhammer competitive includes AoS and 30k players, so the actual 40k competitive playerbase is arguably even smaller. And a lot of the people on warhammer competitive are players that don't actually play tournaments, they are just players motivated to win and keep up with the meta to give themselves a competitive edge. A quick perusal at the BCP database indicates that theres a total of just under 20k ITC ranked players and 37k BCP ranked players for 40k worldwide, for example, so the actual competitive (ie tournament going) 40k playerbase is actually quite small in the context of the hundreds of thousands or even millions of players that we expect to exist... but the rules are increasingly catering to that group of lets say 40,000 players and forcing the other 3.4 million or so I've estimated to play their way.

Pretty much this-

GW makes their money on volume of sales. most gamers including 40K gamers are not us. they collect and paint but may not play hardly at all, or very rarely. i seem to remember a poll we did here years ago where most people who still "actively" wargame maybe get a game or 2 in a month for a total of a few hours.

Compare that to somebody like me who has a hardcore group of dedicated gamers who drive out of their way or have changed their life choices just to stay in the area because we have such a good community where over a dozen players come in at least once a week and spent in excess of 12 hours just on one day gaming a dozen different systems including various GW games both past and present. it makes us far better experienced and vocal about things like GW shenanigans. yet most of us are not tournament minded players who are in that group of people who publicly track games for GW.

the vast majority it seems 40K wise don't even do the previous and many just drop out after a year or so do to cost or other factors. it is nowhere near where it was when i started as far as frequency, drive or volume of players. most of us old school guys have had a huge collection built up over decades for many years so we don't really need much from GW anymore other than the game rules itself. and when they Feth that up we ignore that to.

This will and does cause friction with the tournament/you must play the most current edition crowd. as i know of people who dislike me because i advocate and promote older editons of 40K/specialist games over the thing they call current 40K . on the up side it does draw in players who enjoy it as well.

Yeah, the only reason I played any of 9th/10th is my favored opponent. Otherwise I stick to "not-40k" (i.e. 30k, Necromunda, Epic). Thankfully the previously mentioned systems draw in a similar mindset.

I'm not interested in having to pull teeth to get a try-hard to agree to my list (most are legends), which terrain is what, and that I'm playing to relax). Fortunately for myself, it's not difficult to avoid playing them as I'd rather NOT play(at all) than play with a douchebag.

I've brought this up before, but does anyone recall how Chapter Approved changed from something that was all about trying out fun new things, adding new missions and different ways of playing to a strict set of new missions for tournaments? It was sometime between 8th and 9th (probably coinciding with Tournament Edition 40k, which is what 9th was).

I think my fav mission in 8th was one where there were 6 objectives, and each objective had a value (1 to 6). Each player placed 3, and depending on what number that objective had, it would vanish at the end of that game turn (games were also 6 and not 5 turns - a change which is yet another symptom of tournament play taking over). Meant that getting the higher number objectives was better, as they could be scored longer, but you may not place them, so you could end up with the 1 and 2 near you, and the 5 and 6 near your opponent. It was great fun. I presume modern day tournament crowds would scream bloody murder about its "imbalance", probably because they can't build a netlist tailored to win it without thinking.
 

Wayniac wrote:
... people immediately start bitching that you "need" secondary objectives to have a balanced game, which IMHO just sounds like ITC propaganda bullgak that has bled into the masses.

Much like we "need" symmetrical terrain for a balanced game.

This has to be the gaming equivalent of the Overton Window.

 Hellebore wrote:
For a while I've thought that tournaments should be their own rules set.

Like combat patrols are currently.

Here are our fixed army lists tested into the ground for balance, here is our symmetrical terrain so you both have identical challenges.

Go nuts...

Because tournaments are now purely win measuring contests, they really want a game of chess with 40k colours, that way the only variables are their skill and the dice (maybe they could just get rid of the dice and give each unit in the locked down tournament lists an average percentage success value and then it's purely their skill - that's going back to the rock paper scissors of little wars...).



IMO if tournaments had their own army list ecosystem restricted to purely balanced lists, maybe 3 per faction, then maybe casual gaming wouldn't get as subsumed by tournament culture because it would be where your personality and creativity existed.

From Rogue Trader to 7th edition we had over 20 years of seeing what 40K looked like when GW ignored the existence of tournament-level play and the answer is that the game looked like gak. I don't know why anyone has to "wonder" what 40K would resemble as a game without catering to the pros when in 80% of the game's history literally no one on the design team gave a damn about balance and it showed.

It's been very interesting witnessing tourny-play become more and more of a scapegoat for balancing problems as time goes on. I'm really curious what people think tournament-play had to do with the creation of things like Daemon-factory, strength D weapons, invisibility spam,deathstars with 2+ invulns, allies shenanigans etc.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

I think my fav mission in 8th was one where there were 6 objectives, and each objective had a value (1 to 6). Each player placed 3, and depending on what number that objective had, it would vanish at the end of that game turn (games were also 6 and not 5 turns - a change which is yet another symptom of tournament play taking over). Meant that getting the higher number objectives was better, as they could be scored longer, but you may not place them, so you could end up with the 1 and 2 near you, and the 5 and 6 near your opponent. It was great fun. I presume modern day tournament crowds would scream bloody murder about its "imbalance", probably because they can't build a netlist tailored to win it without thinking.

The reason missions like this don't catch on is because for the vast majority of players, their one game a month could go "ah, you placed 5 and 6 on your side and I've just got 1 and 2 here".

Wasn't there another one in 8 where there was an objective in the center that you couldn't take invulnerable saves while you controlled it? Bet daemons players really loved that one a whole lot.

The best part is, if you politely requested a re-rack when the situation turned for the worse for you like that, you got eyed like a WAAC player. "Oh, unfavorable mission so you back out? Bet you wouldn't be asking for a re-rack if YOU got 5 and 6!"

Great times!

 BlaxicanX wrote:
It's been very interesting witnessing tourny-play become more and more of a scapegoat for balancing problems as time goes on.

It's not a scapegoat. There's a direct correlation between the shape the game is taking and how that relates to tournament games since 8th.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
...It's been very interesting witnessing tourny-play become more and more of a scapegoat for balancing problems as time goes on. I'm really curious what people think tournament-play had to do with the creation of things like Daemon-factory, strength D weapons, invisibility spam,deathstars with 2+ invulns, allies shenanigans etc.

I think you're missing the point. Tournament play isn't being blamed for "balance problems", it's being blamed for the game turning into what, to some of us, is an ever blander and blander exercise in grinding balls of numbers against each other that doesn't make any concessions to narrative or immersion, and for a community that is increasingly confused and terrified by the prospect of varying from the official rules in any way lest they "ruin the balance of the game". The difference between 3rd-7th and 8th-10th isn't that one was balanced and the other wasn't, it's that in 3rd-7th we all knew and acknowledged the game didn't work very well as written and we should have the freedom to fiddle with it, while 8th-10th feels increasingly like it's dominated by an attitude that people should be playing "real 40k" and any deviation from the official rules should be frowned on and criticized.

I mean, our group plays points levels that have varied since 3rd Ed: 850, 1055, 1255, 1850, 1855, 2555 and so on.

Talked about a 2055 list a few weeks ago (not here) and had someone tell me with a straight face that you can't play that points level.

Excuse me, what?

It's just like the "minimum sized" boards that were created simply because of GW's box-sizes, but were leapt upon with ravenous hunger by the tournament crowd who saw $$$ for new custom sized mats and symmetrical terrain sets to go with them.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I've brought this up before, but does anyone recall how Chapter Approved changed from something that was all about trying out fun new things, adding new missions and different ways of playing to a strict set of new missions for tournaments? It was sometime between 8th and 9th (probably coinciding with Tournament Edition 40k, which is what 9th was).

9th I'm pretty sure. Chapter Approved in 8th was like the pre-AOS 3.0 GHB (which also now is just tournament rules and lost everything else that made it interesting): Had something for each type of play, so it included some wacky missions, some fun narrative ones (I want to say 8th had Cityfight and Planetstrike stuff), and then matched play. And 9 out of 10 times, it may as well have just been the Matched Play stuff as that's all anyone bought it for, and all anyone cared about. I remember that after even the first Chapter Approved of 8th, nobody wanted to even touch the missions in the rulebook; it HAD to be the chapter approved missions or nothing. Even though the book missions were perfectly fine, they weren't "updated" so therefore were bad.

That's the mindset I hate most of all. The idea just because it's the latest set of matched play crap, it's better than the previous on and the previous one is obsolete, and if you mention using it you get the same kind of look like if you turned up with plastic army men proxying space marines and coke cans proxying tanks. All the variety is gone, it's whatever the latest "season" horsegak is (a horrific idea for a tabletop game by the way, this isn't a fething MOBA or Diablo) and everything else is junk that nobody should ever look at again.

I don't completely blame the tournament players, but I do think that the screaming about balance this and balance that has stripped the game of anything that made it interesting and enjoyable and left us with the bland shell we have now. is it playable? Sure. Is it good? Subjective, but maybe. But it's BLAND. It's simplistic in its design, seemingly to cater to the min-maxing players, and little thought is made for the other sides; but I bet you wont' see the tournament players say that needs to come back, because it doesn't affect them and, for most of them, it was just a waste of space, time, and design effort.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:
It's been very interesting witnessing tourny-play become more and more of a scapegoat for balancing problems as time goes on.

It's not a scapegoat. There's a direct correlation between the shape the game is taking and how that relates to tournament games since 8th.

YES YES YES AND MORE YES.

Scapegoat it is not.
it's more like feth YOU AND YOUR ARMY mentality and "MY FUN MATTERS MORE THAN OUR FUN" focus.

Racerguy180 wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:
It's been very interesting witnessing tourny-play become more and more of a scapegoat for balancing problems as time goes on.

It's not a scapegoat. There's a direct correlation between the shape the game is taking and how that relates to tournament games since 8th.

YES YES YES AND MORE YES.

Scapegoat it is not.
it's more like feth YOU AND YOUR ARMY mentality and "MY FUN MATTERS MORE THAN OUR FUN" focus.

it's not even that. it's that the comp play wants one thing good (a balanced game) which is good for non-comp, but then to achieve that wants to strip out everything else that makes non-comp fun. And, for whatever reason, they push the mindset that if you don't follow their lead, your game could *gasp* be unbalanced, and you might *gasp x2* waste some time in a game. it's fearmongering.