Seriously, he needs an EPT. PS 8 and no EPT? It's not like he's flying a Lambda shuttle!

I suppose they weren't keen on barrel-rolling Y-wings then.

If it was actually worth putting R2-D6 on Horton, then it would show up somewhere at Regionals. It hasn't.

There are plenty of viable strategies that don't turn up in Regionals because by the looks of it people'd rather go with netdecks or minor variations because they're more confident in them.

Yeah, finding representation in the top of the top squads is a bad measure, especially as the game expands. Not every ship, and not every pilot will see representation in the top squads. That does not automatically make something bad.

Seriously, he needs an EPT. PS 8 and no EPT? It's not like he's flying a Lambda shuttle!

I suppose they weren't keen on barrel-rolling Y-wings then.

Or a cheap way to manipulate PS...Salm + Swarm Tactics is three points cheaper than Luke with the same, and they may have thought that people would take Salm just to get more high-PS shots. Granted, yours is far more likely, but this is the only other thing I could think of without going into Wave 2 ships...

If it was actually worth putting R2-D6 on Horton, then it would show up somewhere at Regionals. It hasn't.

There are plenty of viable strategies that don't turn up in Regionals because by the looks of it people'd rather go with netdecks or minor variations because they're more confident in them.

Yeah, finding representation in the top of the top squads is a bad measure, especially as the game expands. Not every ship, and not every pilot will see representation in the top squads. That does not automatically make something bad.

To both above: I disagree. Wave 3 Regionals data was reasonably diverse. Go check the data, especially the squad archetypes. Regardless, Final Cut + Top Third at Regionals represent the most competitive players. If you want to say "but other builds are viable!".... well, maybe not so much at the more competitive levels. The burden is on you to go do well at Regionals / Nationals / Worlds with said odd-squad and prove that it can work.

Wave 4 is another story, it is still adjusting to Phantoms and New and Improved Falcon builds.

Diversity is different than representation. Diversity is much easier to get as the game expands with more options. Representation, especially if you are only looking at 4-32 squads, gets a bit more difficult when there are more options. No representation does not mean it is a bad ship/pilot/upgrade.

Diversity is different than representation. Diversity is much easier to get as the game expands with more options. Representation, especially if you are only looking at 4-32 squads, gets a bit more difficult when there are more options. No representation does not mean it is a bad ship/pilot/upgrade.

Reported attendance at 2014 Regionals is 1,672 players. That is sufficiently large enough to get a proportional representation of successful usage of any pilot / upgrade, with very good statistical certainty.

Back on topic, I had breakfast for lunch today.

Cheese, chives and crispy pancetta omelette. On toast. And a glass of fresh orange juice.

I'd say the Y needs help and a refresh. But no more so than the hwk or bomber. The y has been out longer and the best part is that if it helps the Y it can help the hawk and probably have a little bomber carry over to boot.

Go check the data, especially the squad archetypes.

Your presented data doesn't show the squads that competed, you only have the winners. Where is the Regionals data on the squads that competed but didn't win?

Yes, XXBB, TIE swarms, the latest netdeck almost always turns up. Because there's so **** many! How many XXBBs don't make the top cut per one that does? X-wing has a very strong random element and thus if you have a hell of a lot of the same passable squad it's going to hit the top over and over. In a regional where say a quarter of the squads are Whisper, a quarter are FalconZZZ and a quarter are TIE swarms, what are the chances of a FalconZZZ, a Whisper and a TIE swarm hitting the top cut?

A good squad wins a high profile tourny (say Paul Heaver's XXBB), it gets copied by lots people who think they'll win too if they copy that guy's squad. Every time it competes it has a chance of winning, having so many duplicate squads vastly increases the chance of an XXBB winning, of XXBB appearing in the top however many. Its appearance reinforces the popular belief that it's good, and even more of them are played, even higher chance of XXBB victories. The meta-loved netdecks don't only win by being good, they win because they vastly outnumber every other squad.

How many people started flying XXBB from a full understanding of the squad's merits and demerits versus other options, and how many people figured "Paul Heaver won with it, everyone's flying it now, it's gotta be good, I'll take it."

Go check the data, especially the squad archetypes.

Your presented data doesn't show the squads that competed, you only have the winners. Where is the Regionals data on the squads that competed but didn't win?

If all you care about are competitive squads / pilots / etc, then it doesn't matter, unless the goal is to figure out what NOT to do.

Edit: Top Third is still a fairly wide net. The majority of squads and pilots reported and statistically tracked in the Regionals report did NOT win.

But again, you are getting the Tier 1 squads. The data you are gathering is pretty good for that, and looking at the top squads is good for determining the meta. I'm talking about the Tier 2 stuff. Fun stuff, that can win, but isn't exactly gaurenteed to win big events. I've seen what happens when designers focus too much on the high end stuff. As wide and varied as the tier 1 stuff is, the tier 2 will usually be a good amount wider. Especially in this game where tactics and dice really matter.

In the end, it comes down to the Expose issue. People look at it from a math point of view to try to fit it into a competitive model. They fail to realize that Expose isn't meant to be a competitive upgrade or appeal to competitive players. It is meant to appeal to those that like to roll the dice. Many judge it on it's averages, but those that like it, look at it's potential.

Not everything is going to be top tier. The designers are good, but no designer is that good.

I am getting the most competitive squads. If you want to label that as "tier 1", then OK.

... I'm talking about the Tier 2 stuff. Fun stuff, that can win, but isn't exactly gaurenteed to win big events. I've seen what happens when designers focus too much on the high end stuff. As wide and varied as the tier 1 stuff is, the tier 2 will usually be a good amount wider. Especially in this game where tactics and dice really matter.

In the end, it comes down to the Expose issue. People look at it from a math point of view to try to fit it into a competitive model. They fail to realize that Expose isn't meant to be a competitive upgrade or appeal to competitive players. It is meant to appeal to those that like to roll the dice. Many judge it on it's averages, but those that like it, look at it's potential.

Not everything is going to be top tier. The designers are good, but no designer is that good.

No. No no no no, just no. This is a difference in design philosophy. My philosophy is that balanced = universally better.

"having fun / fly casual", and "being competitively balanced" are independent of each other. Even so, game experience is undeniably better for both the casual and competitive crowd when the game is balanced. In an ideal world:

• New players can take things like TIE Advanced, Expose, Fel's Wrath, Arvel, and turretless Y-wings and won't be additionally handicapped
• The competitive scene will use all 16 ships in roughly the same proportion. Diversity abounds. Everyone wins (thematically).

In a very well-balanced game, there won't be any clear "top-tier" or "bottom tier" units. Everything will be balanced and have its place in a competitive build somewhere. This is currently not the case in X-wing Miniatures. Go look at a balanced game like Starcraft: every unit gets used. That's a good design goal. Using "lets just play casual" as an excuse for poor game balance is not.

I think FFG knows all this, they just haven't figured out how to implement it and patch the weak spots. MathWing has predicted and could have avoided the the issues we have with ships like the TIE Advanced, A-wing, Outer Rim Smuggler, and with upgrades like Expose and Blaster Turret. It has also predicted that the Z-95s and TIE Phantoms are very good. But FFG doesn't seem to use MathWing, and the A-wing will be their first real fix.

A good squad wins a high profile tourny (say Paul Heaver's XXBB), it gets copied by lots people who think they'll win too if they copy that guy's squad. Every time it competes it has a chance of winning, having so many duplicate squads vastly increases the chance of an XXBB winning, of XXBB appearing in the top however many. Its appearance reinforces the popular belief that it's good, and even more of them are played, even higher chance of XXBB victories. The meta-loved netdecks don't only win by being good, they win because they vastly outnumber every other squad.

How many people started flying XXBB from a full understanding of the squad's merits and demerits versus other options, and how many people figured "Paul Heaver won with it, everyone's flying it now, it's gotta be good, I'll take it."

I agree 100% with this in any customize-able game people naturally flock to what that one guy did to win. If the 2014 Worlds winner used 4 Tie Advanced all with cluster/concussion Missiles I would bet we would see an Immediate spike in Tie Advanced usage

I think that's why smaller local tourneys appeal to me more People run what they want to run, rather than what the internet says is the best, Small local tourneys probably aren't 60+% Falcons and Phantoms like the bigger tourneys such as Regionals and Nationals are

Reported attendance at 2014 Regionals is 1,672 players. That is sufficiently large enough to get a proportional representation of successful usage of any pilot / upgrade, with very good statistical certainty.

Quick question I assume that those numbers are total Attendees and not Unique players? If that is just total numbers the I imagine it would still be above 1000 unique players but it probably slightly skews the list representation a little bit

Reported attendance at 2014 Regionals is 1,672 players. That is sufficiently large enough to get a proportional representation of successful usage of any pilot / upgrade, with very good statistical certainty.

Quick question I assume that those numbers are total Attendees and not Unique players? If that is just total numbers the I imagine it would still be above 1000 unique players but it probably slightly skews the list representation a little bit

I obviously don't know everyone that goes, so yeah, that is total attendance. People still sometimes bring different squads though. At least, if they do poorly and play again they generally try a different squad...

Squads that win get re-used by the same players attending multiple events because, well, they work.

Go check the data, especially the squad archetypes.

Your presented data doesn't show the squads that competed, you only have the winners. Where is the Regionals data on the squads that competed but didn't win?

If all you care about are competitive squads / pilots / etc, then it doesn't matter, unless the goal is to figure out what NOT to do.

Edit: Top Third is still a fairly wide net. The majority of squads and pilots reported and statistically tracked in the Regionals report did NOT win.

If all you care about are competitive squads / pilots / etc, then it doesn't matter, unless the goal is to figure out what NOT to do.

The goal is to compensate for volume: if there are six XXBBs in a 16 man tournament then XXBB has a significantly higher chance of winning than a squad with only one or two entries, no? The ratio of matches played to matches won for every XXBB gives a more accurate picture of XXBB's performance than if XXBB regularly hits the top. I acknowledge that to gather all this data would be highly impractical, but without it the top squads are heavily influenced by perceived quality. That data's very useful for predicting what the herd will fly (allowing you to counterbuild it) but it doesn't give reliable data about the objective quality of a list, and certainly not of individual ships.

The goal is to compensate for volume: if there are six XXBBs in a 16 man tournament then XXBB has a significantly higher chance of winning than a squad with only one or two entries, no? The ratio of matches played to matches won for every XXBB gives a more accurate picture of XXBB's performance than if XXBB regularly hits the top. I acknowledge that to gather all this data would be highly impractical, but without it the top squads are heavily influenced by perceived quality. That data's very useful for predicting what the herd will fly (allowing you to counterbuild it) but it doesn't give reliable data about the objective quality of a list, and certainly not of individual ships.

You could do this with the existing data, starting at Final Cut / Top Third and seeing which squads / ships / etc make Winners. You can build conditional probabilities from that.

But aren't you then missing the bottom two thirds and all the failed TIE swarms, XXBBs, TIE phantoms and Falcon Zs they may or may not contain?

But aren't you then missing the bottom two thirds and all the failed TIE swarms, XXBBs, TIE phantoms and Falcon Zs they may or may not contain?

Seeing as it is hard enough just to get the Final Cut + Top Third, yes, I am missing the bottom lists for most of the Regionals.

I'm just saying that you could do what you describe starting with the lists that made the Final Cut / Top Third.

You could but it would suffer from the same problem. We can't draw iron conclusions about the quality of a ship or a list from the Regional results because it requires the assumption that an even distribution of each type of list is being played, which I severely doubt is the case.

My entire argument is, because we lack that data (I acknowledge how phenomenally hard that would be to get and throughly commend you getting as much data as you do) we don't know how many copies of the meta-loved lists fail utterly, and thus we don't know which are hitting the top third because they're superior and which are getting there by weight of numbers.

The more copies/variants of a list you have in a player pool the higher the chance one of them will get a high enough score to be noticed. As a result, a list's popularity can inflate its success simply because more of them means more chances to win. It's success inflates its popularity in turn and we get a cycle where the perceived quality of a list keeps it a regular sight in the Top Third and there it stays until it gets spooked out by something like the TIE phantom.

Without the data we can't prove this effect isn't happening (although we can't prove it is either) and thus do we not need to acknowledge the possibility that it could be skewing the Top Third results. That makes the tournament data unreliable for making conclusions about ships without other data to back it up.

Using that line of reasoning it is philosophically impossible to ever remove this uncertainty.

Hypothesis: "Any data that gets reported can then get copied in the internet echo chamber."

Great, so lets get 100% of all Regionals results.... except now people will still say (and are saying it now) that Regional lists are skewed based on copycatting.

OK, so lets get 100% of Store Championship squads.... except now people will say that THOSE results are just as skewed.

You could keep going like this forever. So where do you draw the line and decide that you have enough data? If you don't draw the line somewhere then the entire discussion is pointless.

Yes people copy lists, but if a ship / combo is good, someone is going to eventually figure it out. Maybe not 1 month after release, but by 6 months in, absolutely. The wave 3 Regionals meta data is very, very stable. We know that naked Y-wings don't work. End of story.

I don't even know what's going on in this thread anymore.

Y-Wing is borked, FFG ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ plz gif update.

I don't even know what's going on in this thread anymore.

Y-Wing is borked, FFG ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ plz gif update.

I want new pilots and upgrades, not an image file.

I don't even know what's going on in this thread anymore.

2) R2-D6 is brought up; many posters disregard it as a "tax".

3) One poster comments that if it was worth putting the droid on the Y-wings it would have been seen at regionals. It wasn't. Ergo, it's not worth it, and the droid doesn't solve the issue.

4) Poster brings up fact that gauging squadron composition based on regionals results is flawed, based on statistical biases caused by a preference for net decking.

5) Talk commences about why it's flawed, if it is truly so, and potential ways to correct for the issue.

6) You try to regain the original topic by posting an ASCII face that reminds me of Lumpy Space Princess.

7) I give you a play-by-play, since I've been following the thread.

8) You give me a Like, compensating me for my help.

Sounds like someone is fishing for a like. So I'll bite. Although I'm not an ork.

Does this ewar y-wing variant actually exist in any canon sources? Because from what I've found with a little searching it seems like its origin is in a fan-made RPG book and it doesn't exist anywhere else. And if this is accurate then I don't see why anyone is discussing it here, FFG isn't going to use random fan ideas they've probably never even heard of.

Ha Ha, you're a funny kid... Y-wings are in the game, and Jamming is in the game,

what FFG doesn't need is anyone telling them what they are never going to combine.

Hey, remember when you were banned from BoardGameGeek for bizarrely aggressive and incoherent spam?

The Longprobe is a real thing , but the "Recon" variant isn't, and two system upgrades would be insane. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for either.

I have to quote this just so that I have the unedited original to laugh at.

Hey, remember when you were banned from BoardGameGeek for bizarrely aggressive and incoherent spam?

The Longprobe is a real thing, but the "Recon" variant isn't, and two system upgrades would be insane. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for either.

Oh, that sounds like a good read. Can I get a link?

He won't because he knows suspensions at BBG are b*llsh*t,

based on the number of dislikes your post gets.

But you can check the date of my last post here.