Dead Scribe

Ok? There are no awards for remarkable wins or varying degrees of wins. There is only a tournament champion. Short of making sure no one is cheating, no one cares how those people get there. When people win Adepticon and the LVO tournaments, unless the champions were found to be cheating, no one remarks on anything other than those people win time and time again. Those champions also typically are running one of the most powerful lists of the time that they are playing. Thats just how it is and how it goes. When you can come up with a tournament system that rewards types of wins and gives more credit to people winning with B-Tier choices, you might see some change.

As I'm getting tired of you putting words in my mouth, stating that I am saying things that I never said over and over again, I have reported your post to the moderators.

I think you're jumping through hoops trying to argue and win the argument. Had you said there are multiple ways to play and all of them are equal to the designer I wouldn't have said anything. You said competitive play wasn't how the game is intended to be played. I asked you to provide proof that the designers stated competitive way wasn't how they intended the game to be played. You have now come back with there are multiple ways to play so competitive is not the one true way to play, which is putting words in my mouth since I never wrote that competitive play is the one true way to play.

I know that Kings of War has a tiny presence. I also know that kings of war is mostly competitive players and that listbuilding is a thing in Kings of War, so I don't think Kings of War disproves that listbuilding is important. They may likely do it better than AOS does but listbuilding is still a thing a lot of those guys prefer. I know nothing about Conquest, but looking it up it just came out and has like a quarter of its models released, so we really have no idea what type of community is going to play Conquest at this time to make any comments nor can we make guesses on how well balanced it is since it just came out and hardly anyone is playing it yet. Last - if people really felt that balance was the most important thing to their game, GW wouldn't have the largest marketshare. That it is the largest marketshare by leaps and bounds shows that people don't really care about balance, because they will still play the games with balance or no balance. That AOS and 40k tournaments have 300+ people attending regularly shows that people attending tournaments don't really care about balance. That podcasts and youtubes discuss how to break the game regularly by people attending tournaments shows that people enjoy breaking the game and aren't really interested in multiple ways to build an army competitively. They may be, they may not be, there is no data to suggest either way other than GW tournaments have been running for longer than I have been involved in the game and there are always full which to me means that the concept that balance is something desired and that people want multiple ways to build competitive armies is not really desired or cared about. Otherwise I would expect AOS tournaments to struggle like Kings of War tournaments struggle.

None of that has anything to do with this conversation chain. You originated it by saying that competitive play is not how the designer intended the game to be played. I asked you to provide proof of that. Now you are saying there are multiple ways of playing the game. No kidding dude. I never said there wasn't. I asked you to provide proof that the game was not intended for competitive play as you tried to assert.

"There are plenty of wargames and boardgames out there that are pretty close to balanced and are not boring at all." You never answered my question. What wargame is considered balanced and not boring at all by more than a handful of people? My criteria is that you aren't going to throw some unknown game published by Osprey that has like 20 people that play it that find it fun. You're asking me what a majority of people are but are trying to say that there are plenty of wargames that are pretty close to balanced that are not boring at all. What are they? Because if you're trying to say that people actively crave and want balance, and there are *plenty* of wargames that have this level of balance, I would expect that GW games would have very few players. But thats obviously not the case.

Can you give some examples specifically of wargames that are balanced that have a good population and where it is not considered boring by a majority of people?

I no absolutely no one that plays the 9th age or of any 9th age events in North America. I do however know over one hundred highly competitive players in north america, many of whom would disagree with that assertion. The fact of the matter is that balance has nothing to do with competitive. You can be competitive with balanced rules and you can be equally competitive with unbalanced rules. The whole skill thing is also something you cannot objectively gauge in most games today other than through listbuilding and knowing that if two equal lists were brought, then the player that wins the most would be considered most skilled. However that is impossible to do in today's tournament culture because all of the lists are different, and people don't really care about the math behind what is stronger, they will say you can't go off of the math. So as it pertains to AOS, skill is determined by tournament wins. The more tournament wins u rack up, the more skilled you are compared to players that can't win tournaments, because we're all playing within the same confines of the rules and listbuilding.

Do a poll somewhere asking competitive players what they want. Most want listbuilding to play a heavy hand in the game and how we play. Very few competitive players talk about how they want the game to be perfectly balanced so only skill decides who wins. A great many however will argue against people griping about points and any time there is a topic about points being balanced, you will see them jump in about how boring the game would be if 2000 points matched up equally against 2000 points. So no I don't think my opinion is naive at all. I also don't think everything is about competitive play. Everything as far as I am concerned is about competitive play, but that doesn't mean I think everything overall is about competitive play.

That doesn't in any way give a quote from a rules designer on how the game is 'intended to be played', as you were trying to state. Its fine to say "to me, the game is not intended to be a competitive game." Its not fine to state that its a fact however because its not without a designers intent quote stating such.

I think its intentional. I think its them appeasing the competitive crowd. I dont think its possible for a professional rules crew to accidently release so many broken rules into the wild lol.

And yet here we are.

Do you have a designer quote from the gw writers stating "the way it was meant to be played"? Or are you just stating that you don't think competitive play is the way it was meant to be played beacuse thats your opinion that you are trotting as a fact?

I'd have to disagree. I think many people want list building to be as potent as it is right now, otherwise the game gets boring. If there is no list building phase you can sink your teeth into then everything is the same, which will turn a lot of people off. I think the consequence of listbuilding having such a big impact in the game is that that means you have to have things that are good and things that are bad, which means the more you want listbuilding to matter in this game, the worse the balance has to be to accomodate that..

Like it or not though thats how the game designers have designed the game and what they are running with. Until they balance the game, I and people like me (who are more numerous then what people like to think) are not going to self-handicap ourselves.

My store isn't casual. Casuals don't really play at my store. People know that to play at our store means you will be playing competitively, and everyone is perfectly fine with that.

AOS may be a bad game for it, but it has the largest player group pretty much anywhere for fantasy gaming and I wouldnt find a kings of war tournament fun if there were only 3 people there (which is the reality, the only place I've ever seen any non gw game have more than 3-4 people in one place was at adepticon and i'm not investing in a game to play it once a year). And if I'm going for "good enough" then I'll end up against someone who went all out at a tournament and I'll lose that game and then lose the chance of winning the tournament which is why I don't just go for good enough.

To be clear, I embrace the imbalance simply because I know the writers at gw aren't going to balance the game. Its either embrace the balance and be positive about the game, and they intentionally write these imbalances for people like me it would seem. Or be angry about the imbalance and bitter and complain and quit, which I dont want to do. I would prefer the game be balanced but at the same time, they are doing me a favor by signalling which armies I should invest in without me having to do a lot of actual work to figure it out because its usually pretty obvious. To me, the constant complaining about balance is exhausting because no one is listening or going to actually bring balance to the game. From my research, this has been an ongoing complaint for over a decade. People complain a lot, and then nothing happens, and then they keep on playing anyway only complaining. Life is too short!

Instead of trying to get into pedantry about analogies... the point is in a competition you bring your best list and do your best with it. GW doesn't make a game that is balanced or where everything is in the same class. So you don't bother with the things that are not in the competitive class and you take the armies that can be competitive. Its really that simple.

You can say what you want, I think you're pretty much breaking the terms of the site by attacking me, but most of the competitive guys that I know and have talked to up and down the east coast and all the way into the midwest have similar attitudes about the game and do the same things. If you're really truly up in arms about the bad balance then do something about it by not giving the company your money until they put balance into the game maybe?

I would imagine any competitive player's approach to the game is "what is good for me to win?" and nothing else matters. Thats why we are competitive players. We play to win the game and win events and compete for the highest standings possible amongst our peers. You don't set out to win the game and win events and compete for the highest standings possible with anything other than the most powerful machine or team that you can choose. I also race cars, and would be like me driving a non tuned sedan in a race where my opponents have all modified their engines and transmissions and body weights, because I like the look of my car and just want to drive casual. Except when I want to drive casual its not at the race track, and when I'm at the race track Im driving the best car I can buy with the best mods and performance tuners that I can get my hands on. Same with tabletop gaming.

The same thing that happens in all games that have alternate activation where that situation arises I imagine. In my investigation into other games I rarely if ever hear people complain about it.

Right which is why I say we don't use house rules here, so the idea of just house rule double turn away is not viable for me or the group I play with. I will also just say that in regards to double turn causing game over that I think in my experience that has been true probably 4 in 5 games pretty regularly over the past couple years. Its not 100% but it happens often enough that most people give up when it happens and I would like to see it revisited or even be something like warcry or even the lord of the rings game.

House rules are not a thing we allow in my store, or in any of the stores near me.

I don't fully buy that. If that was an absolute, then the dudes that win tournaments regularly I'd expect to be also using weaker armies, and most I know or see are always using top powered armies too.