As I read reviews, I saw more and more people slam the game for the "lack of balance", seemingly ignoring the fact that you were supposed to A) Not be a ****** and try to game the system and B) Have a chat with your opponent to decide what made sense. Still, I saw lots of posts laughing about how one could do something stupid like field 10 Nagashes or 16 cannons or other unrealistic things that never would happen, forgetting again that if someone tried that, they would likely not even get a full game as anyone setting up against it would call them out, likely not play, and worse that person would then get a reputation as "that guy" to be avoided since they try to game the system.
When The General's Handbook was announced, and the world rejoiced. Points, finally! The game is "complete" now. It will be balanced. And I felt a lump in my throat, because I knew what that meant: That any other way to play is now dead and buried. Points, once introduced to the game, will consume any other style and become the default way of playing. Communicating with your opponent goes out the window, because you no longer need to; the points are the only communication you need. When The General's Handbook finally came out, and not everything had points, that fear grew larger, because it meant anything without points might as well not exist. And that proved to be true: Those nice battalions in the Start Collecting boxes, or the larger boxed armies, or the new (Christmas 2016) battleforces? They don't exist, because they have no points. Grombrindal, the legendary White Dwarf himself, has zero reason to be bought by most players because he has no points, so you can't use him, and GW has stated that not everything is intended for all three playstyles, which as a result means they won't be used at all. As I feared, Matched Play quickly subsumed everything else to become the only way to play Age of Sigmar. The General's Handbook might as well have started on page 98 (that's the section where Matched Play begins).
My problem with this is twofold: First, Matched Play is one of the styles to play, not the only style. It's clearly intended for tournament type events where you need something to balance and can't reasonably chat with your opponent. Yet here we are, I would wager, where the vast majority of games have boiled down to two questions:
How many points? Which of the six Pitched Battle scenarios will we use? Everything else may as well not even be there because god forbid a scenario require deployment other than the standard. All those interesting Battleplans from the various campaign books and Battletomes might as well not exist anymore, because they aren't roughly even Pitched Battles with roughly even Matched Play army construction. The game goes from being wildly varied to droll and boring, with most of the options gutted because nobody wants to take the time and effort to be responsible hobbyists.
But wait, you say. We need points. Otherwise nothing will stop someone from fielding nothing but the most powerful units. Except yes, things will. Someone who does that is going to face the same problem that someone doing the hypothetical "ten Nagash" list is going to face, that is they will be labeled a ******, refused a game and then get a bad reputation around the group until either they are forced out or learn to play nicely.
Warhammer, perhaps more than any other wargame, is a social game. There is an implied agreement to not game the rules. There is an implied agreement to not try to out cheese one another. A little communication goes a long way, and could still go a long way. There is no reason other than not wanting to bother with talking anyone beyond asking points that Matched Play is now, for many people, the only way to play.
Perhaps the biggest issue with Matched Play is what it implies. You see, before Matched Play , the onus was on the player. If you saw someone who tried to game the system by taking only the best units, or infinite summoning, or the hypthetical ten Nagashes, or any other boogeyman situation, you knew they were a ****** who had zero regard for their opponents and only cared about themselves. With points though, you can still in many cases field very powerful units, even game the system in other ways, because the points aren't balanced across the board (look at any hypothetical power list), except now the player can pretend they aren't really a ******, that they're playing by the rules so there's nothing wrong or that the rules are to blam. Communication, responsibility and accountability take a backseat because there's a fallback that absolves the player from any of those things.
Note I'm not at all saying Matched Play is bad. I'm saying that Matched Play being the default way to play is bad, not because of what it is but because it cuts out a large swathe of the game, for fear of hypothetical situations that never actually happened and likely will never happen except with the rudest of players who literally don't care about anything other than saying they won a game, and it's just as likely those players wouldn't play Warhammer because of all its flaws as a competitive game. Matched Play is perfectly fine, dare i say it necessary, for tournaments, and I'm glad it exists. I just dislike that Matched Play has become, for many of us, the only way to play Age of Sigmar and anything that isn't Matched Play no longer has a place in the game.
In short, I feel that Matched Play should remain an option for Age of Sigmar, not the option. There is IMHO more fun to be had by using Open Play and actually communicating and not being a ****** than there is just throwing down with a 2,000 point list and pretending that it's somehow balanced because it has 3+ Battleline units, 0-6 Leaders, 0-4 Behemoths and 0-4 Artillery. Plus, this puts the onus back on the player to play responsibly. And as a result the game will be better off.
Keep Matched Play where it belongs: The domain of tournaments and structured leagues. For everything else, show some responsibility towards an enjoyable game.
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