Don't blame math wing for being what it is. A descriptor.

You can fly 3 defenders. But you'll find out that 9 attack dice, 9 hull and 9 shield are going to die quickly without doing much damage. And you can't blame math for that.

Also cards not seeing play came out long before math wing. Sure, with math you can find out that 4 unmodified dice don't roll hits as often as 3 dice with a focus. (The math wing description of expose) but expose wasn't being used long before that.

Don't blame the person describing the box as red for the box being red.

Well, except against turrets. 3 Deltas are sort of boned there.

So what you're saying is turrets are interesting to play both with and against and the game needs more, right?

and we have so many varied turrets to chose from

how many!?

as many as we have YT-XXXX variants! Who knows how much!? I've lost count years ago!

I like to think the more you discuss turrets the more disheveled you become as you descend into madness.

I like to think the more you discuss turrets the more disheveled you become as you descend into madness.

accurate representation of my current state:

I'm good enough to win regardless of how "efficient" my choices are.

That's only true to a point. Paul Heaver can't win with a 5 naked HWK list.

More habitually I use Shuttles and Defenders to great success.

Both of which are actually decent ships, especially the Shuttle.

Of course if you can't win without having the "perfect" choices in the list building stage then you're probably not a great player right now anyway.

When you're playing at Regionals for example. You can expect most people there to both be good players and bring good lists. Player skill alone won't win you a game if you're matched up against an equally skilled player. If you go to regionals and don't care where you place, then pilot skill may be the only thing to think about.

But if you expect to finish in the top 16 or so, you better bring a list that can help you get there, because everyone at that point is going to be as good if not better then you.

So while a good player can win with a suboptimal list, a great player knows how to build a good list as well as fly it well.

We get to put the best STAR WARS models EVER MADE on our tables and relive our childhood dreams. AND we get to make our own new stories too!!!

Dats enough for me thanks!

Your kilometers will vary of course.

Here at Boss Central I get about a billion light years per tibanna gas liter.

:lol:

I win every game I play in fact!

I didn't neglect player skill, I just pointed out that there are limits to margins of error, and that there are builds which are so disadvantageous that player skill cannot be expected to overcome it.

... and I stay a billion miles away from the people who insist on using these ships with the up to the second meta-bettah-builds.

I never said I was personally obsessed with Mathwing, I barely understand how to make it work when I want to use it. Rather, I was pointing out that Mathwing provides a service - it tells you how mathematically efficient certain ships are. If you don't want to know how mathematically efficient they are, then fine. There are those who think that Mathwing makes the "meta" by somehow cajoling competitive people into playing min-max lists, but we all know that all of the competitive players are min-maxing with or without Mathwing, it's just a source of information. Moreover, as I said in my first post, Mathwing gives us a language for understanding why some ships seem to be more successful than others which enables the game designers to balance the game more accurately, thus increasing diversity of ships over time. That's all.

Don't blame math wing for being what it is. A descriptor.

You can fly 3 defenders. But you'll find out that 9 attack dice, 9 hull and 9 shield are going to die quickly without doing much damage. And you can't blame math for that.

Also cards not seeing play came out long before math wing. Sure, with math you can find out that 4 unmodified dice don't roll hits as often as 3 dice with a focus. (The math wing description of expose) but expose wasn't being used long before that.

Don't blame the person describing the box as red for the box being red.

And yet 9 hull autoceptor lists with the exact same number of attacks have been doing great against turret lists.

To claim three attack ships can't do enough damage to kill a big ship is plain silly.

Chirpy fel lists have six attacks, whisper bumped it up to seven did they fail to kill anything?

Don't blame math wing for being what it is. A descriptor.

You can fly 3 defenders. But you'll find out that 9 attack dice, 9 hull and 9 shield are going to die quickly without doing much damage. And you can't blame math for that.

Also cards not seeing play came out long before math wing. Sure, with math you can find out that 4 unmodified dice don't roll hits as often as 3 dice with a focus. (The math wing description of expose) but expose wasn't being used long before that.

Don't blame the person describing the box as red for the box being red.

And yet 9 hull autoceptor lists with the exact same number of attacks have been doing great against turret lists.

To claim three attack ships can't do enough damage to kill a big ship is plain silly.

Chirpy fel lists have six attacks, whisper bumped it up to seven did they fail to kill anything?

You're arguing against a straw man here. He pointed out that defenders are inefficient. Autoceptors are quite efficient and have a huge pool of reposition actions which everybody recognizes.

This is like blaming scientists for global warming.

We get to put the best STAR WARS models EVER MADE

nuh- uh

(but seriously, FFG's model quality is so good it's almost silly)

And if you don't believe that we treat the model with far, far too much blind reverence, consider this: if it were slightly to moderately wrong we'd never know.

Some of us would.

The way to address stagnant metas is to give the devs accurate, relevant feedback so that they can incorporate that when putting balance tweaks into the next wave. Some of the most relevant feedback is statistical analysis of the ships, combined with tournament results and trends.

Oh, that's MathWing.

No, I don't think that's Mathwing. Mathwing is about producing models of efficiency to predict the strongest combos of lists to play with.

What you're talking about is good old fashioned data collection and anaylizing. I'm pretty sure that that's not mathwing's primary goal...

According to whom? Based on what evidence?

Look, I do disagree with MajorJuggler. I've done it publicly and repeatedly, to the point of embarrassing myself when he was still new around here and was on v1.0 of his model. But his goals, as far as I can tell, are exactly what WickedGrey described: to use mathematical tools to better understand math outcomes. A predictive model is part of the puzzle, but not the only one.

And if you don't like MJ's model, then set it aside and look harder at the descriptive statistical analysis of tournament results instead. No one is dictating the parameters there--it's just a firehose of data, waiting for someone to understand it. If you think people are doing it wrong, then look at the data yourself and slice it in some new way.

I wonder what the lists would be like if the game was played out at the various locations its played at, and no information was shared and nothing was up on Youtube and each individual meta existed in its own unique environment. Certainly X might win the Nationals, but the diversity in the remaining group might be greater than it might be this year.

Jacob

It's 2015, so I can't tell if you're being ironic (based on which posts you "liked" I'm guessing you're not).

What you're talking about here is not related to Mathwing but to modern communication. Even if the Mathwing wasn't as refined as it was, you'd still have people posting highly successful lists and copying them.

Sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. Without this kind of communication, people wouldn't be able to copycat lists as easily, but taking that along with an excellent worldwide community that generates a lot of energy for the game is a far better tradeoff.

Indeed, netlisting has been a thing for longer than there's been a net. When I was a kid playing Magic, there were print magazines that would do things like break down successful decklists next to an interview with the list's originator.

I should add that, in the current meta, there is one huge reason as to why we're so engrossed in jousting values:

primary weapon turrets

It's time to retire this particular soapbox, fickle. You're not contributing anything new by jumping up and down on it, and in this particular case you're just wrong. Understanding how good a ship is at hanging in space and trading dice is an important part of every list, even if all it teaches you is that your ships don't want to do it.

From what I understand, Mathwing is a projection of a ship's efficiency in terms of stats per cost. It cuts out all dice-independent strategy and focuses purely on the numbers. This is why it is built around the term of "jousting" which is a scenario in which ships are expected to exchange dice by shooting at one another

That's it.

MJ provides two levels of analysis, actually...

True for the most part, but I'm not sure it's terribly relevant. MathWing was a thing before MJ made his model public, and it would be a thing if he moved to Mongolia and took up the life of an itinerant goatherd.

And now, having cleared away some of the chaff...

So, it seems as though (inherently flawed and limited in scope) mathematical models are once again declaring ships to be entirely "not viable".

It's this kind of cynical, statistic-driven analysis that has led - over the last 12 months - to a self-fulfilling prophecy of a meta. Entire ranges of ships, pilots and upgrades are ruled out wholesale because they're considered (under the said inherently flawed and limited in scope model) to be marginally less "efficient" than their cousins.

New players pick up the game, gaze in awe at the wealth of options available, join a forum to find out more and are told "yeah, don't use that unless you want to lose."

TIE swarms became the norm because we're told they're "efficient". BBBBZ becomes the norm because we're told it's "efficient". At the expense of everything which is apparently not.

This (incredibly well designed and balanced) game is packed to the brim with an absolute wealth of options and variety, and yet the dogged pursuit for perceived optimum "efficiency" appears to be stifling those options and killing off that variety. So here's a novel approach: to hell with so-called mathematical efficiency; whatever happened to fun?

You're shooting the messenger. If you think someone is exaggerating the evidence in a particular direction, or that someone is just wrong, then prove it. In X-wing, it couldn't be easier: take four Rookie Pilots to a major tournament and see what happens. Of course, one result is just an anecdote, so you should take your Rookies to a bunch of tournaments--or enlist your friends in an effort to do so.

What you'll find, though, is that the base X-wing doesn't usually earn back its price. It relies on pilot abilities and upgrades to be effective, and even some of those won't work.

TIE swarms were a Thing before MathWing really emerged as a concerted effort. They were a thing because they won reliably, not because someone online was touting them. BBBBZ emerged as a thing not because someone online said B-wings are the most efficient of all possible choices, but because someone wanted to build a five-ship Rebel swarm and realized those five pieces fit neatly together. MathWing helps understand why that build works, but it didn't bring it into being or predict that particular list.

To repeat myself, you're shooting the messenger. The metagame is limited in variety because taken as a system, tournament play represents an organized search for the most reliable winning lists. In a perfectly designed game, there would be an infinite number of choices; X-wing is merely a good game, so the level of diversity varies as the set of game elements changes.

If you're tired of the tournament game, there's nothing wrong with that and I don't blame you. It's absolutely true that 100-point dogfights are helping inform the community's picture of whether or not any particular element is worthwhile, and I'm not sure the game is better off for it. (Which isn't to say the game would be better off if it catered exclusively to casual players, of course.)

But what you seem to be saying here is the equivalent of being angry with the local TV news crew for the week's bad weather. They're not causing it, they're trying to explain it. They're also undoubtedly changing what people expect and how they perceive the weather when it happens, but getting angry with them is probably beside the point unless you're certain you can step up and do a better job of providing objective commentary.

Mathwing is important for ships that cannot reposition. Since Jousting is all they do.

Turrets and Repositioners can artificially increase their pure slugfest longevity, just like how old Whisper/Echo could solo a 100 point list by never being fired upon.

The jousting efficiency scores are extremely relevant for balancing ships, as you can then have an approximation of their worth without arc-dodging. If I have a hypothetical 'C'-Wing that is the exact same as the B-wing except no barrel roll and perhaps a marginally less red dial, it's still going to be worse as it has no better a joust efficiency, but fewer real maneuver options.

Let's say this 'C-Wing' had less 'effective defense' by having fewer hitpoints and 1 AGI dice, which is not mathematically equvilent to the loss in HP, making it an even worse jouster while also not having reposition abilities.

Then suddenly you have an X-Wing.

Don't blame math wing for being what it is. A descriptor.

You can fly 3 defenders. But you'll find out that 9 attack dice, 9 hull and 9 shield are going to die quickly without doing much damage. And you can't blame math for that.

Also cards not seeing play came out long before math wing. Sure, with math you can find out that 4 unmodified dice don't roll hits as often as 3 dice with a focus. (The math wing description of expose) but expose wasn't being used long before that.

Don't blame the person describing the box as red for the box being red.

And yet 9 hull autoceptor lists with the exact same number of attacks have been doing great against turret lists.

To claim three attack ships can't do enough damage to kill a big ship is plain silly.

Chirpy fel lists have six attacks, whisper bumped it up to seven did they fail to kill anything?

The difference is the interceptors have a high pilot skill, strong pilot abilities, excellent dials and action bars, and a stealth device in addition to autothrusters.

For me, personally, all the studying and analytics of MathWing go out the window the second those green dice fall out of my hand because I start praying to whatever god I chose to believe in this week that I roll all the squiggly lines and dots.

Mathwing is a fantastic theoretical tool for competitive X-wing players. While I constantly find myself playing in tournaments, I also play casual games as well. Mathwing, nor its existence, takes away from the diversity and fun of casual games. Most of the time players are talking about competitive play in the forums. Because of this, players are looking to take as much of chance out of the game as possible.

Don't blame math wing for being what it is. A descriptor.

You can fly 3 defenders. But you'll find out that 9 attack dice, 9 hull and 9 shield are going to die quickly without doing much damage. And you can't blame math for that.

Also cards not seeing play came out long before math wing. Sure, with math you can find out that 4 unmodified dice don't roll hits as often as 3 dice with a focus. (The math wing description of expose) but expose wasn't being used long before that.

Don't blame the person describing the box as red for the box being red.

Depends how you build around your defenders and other synergies. The 2 Deltas HLC Jonus list murders turrets. Part of what you the ship cost is what you put on it/how it fits in your squad/goals.

This is like blaming scientists for global warming.

Who invented the bleeding combustion engine again?

This is like blaming scientists for global warming.

Who invented the bleeding combustion engine again?

Industrialists. boom.

Want to know what shapes the meta? Success!

If Mathwing is wrong, and everyone is blindly following it...you should be happy winning all the tournaments yourself.

If you want to play casually, play casually! If you want to play competitively, you'll see Mathwing is more right than it is wrong.

This is like blaming scientists for global warming.

Who invented the bleeding combustion engine again?

Industrialists. boom.

Sorry illegal use of boom it can only be used after the word phrasing pursuant to article 42 subsection 69 of the archer act.

The TIE Interceptor's stat line cost efficiency is actually a hair higher than the X-wing.

And the TIE Interceptor has boost and barrel roll, so if the PS1 Interceptor isn't viable, then the PS2 X-wing certainly is not either.

So, it seems as though (inherently flawed and limited in scope) mathematical models are once again declaring ships to be entirely "not viable".

It's this kind of cynical, statistic-driven analysis that has led - over the last 12 months - to a self-fulfilling prophecy of a meta. Entire ranges of ships, pilots and upgrades are ruled out wholesale because they're considered (under the said inherently flawed and limited in scope model) to be marginally less "efficient" than their cousins.

<snip>

This (incredibly well designed and balanced) game is packed to the brim with an absolute wealth of options and variety, and yet the dogged pursuit for perceived optimum "efficiency" appears to be stifling those options and killing off that variety. So here's a novel approach: to hell with so-called mathematical efficiency; whatever happened to fun?

I'm sorry, but I disagree with the entire premise of your post, that there could possibly be a "self-fulfilling prophecy of a meta".

First of all, I'm going to assume you mean the competitive meta, because if your local guys are flying nothing but Fat Hans or BBBBZ for casual play, you need to setup a "******" jar (with a light-hearted attitude about it) and tell those guys they've got to drop in a dollar for every match, which goes to the group pizza fund. The point being that less-optimal ships and pilots get flown all the time in casual play, because at heart we all love Star Wars and we want to put it's characters on the table.

So, is the competitive meta really driven by MathWing? No, but the simple truths found within MathWing are discovered by anyone wanting to play competitively. It doesn't take long to figure out that a Blue is a more durable jouster than a Rookie. And it's not much of a secret that a fast, maneuverable turret provides consistent damage and might be considered "easier" to fly.

New players pick up the game, gaze in awe at the wealth of options available, join a forum to find out more and are told "yeah, don't use that unless you want to lose."

Sorry, I just don't buy it. But even if it were true, this wouldn't shape the meta. You don't build a squad to counter what a new guy is flying, it doesn't matter. The meta is shaped at the top, because regardless of this being a dice game, real skill is involved, and the lack of it can't be overcome with a Fat Han.

TIE swarms became the norm because we're told they're "efficient". BBBBZ becomes the norm because we're told it's "efficient". At the expense of everything which is apparently not.

TIEs swarms aren't the norm, and neither is BBBBZ. Both lists take practice and skill to fly to success. And as for "at the expense of everything else"... seriously? Have you even looked at the Regionals results thread? Please point me to the preponderance of TIE swarms and 4BZ lists in the top 8 results of those tourneys. No, go ahead, I'll wait.

During the post-scum store championship season we saw perhaps the healthiest, most diverse meta in quite a while. And though it does seem like Regionals are turning into turret-wing, there are still a lot of matches to be played. So, while I don't think I've ever bothered to look at the MathWing thread, I follow the Results thread religiously. If Fel/RAC is winning a lot, I need to be confident that what I bring can beat it. And then I need to think about what other people might bring to counter it, and can I beat that? Am I good enough to win the mirror match? What squads am I going to be most vulnerable vs, and what is my plan of action for those?

And man, for me, that is all FUN.

The TIE Interceptor's stat line cost efficiency is actually a hair higher than the X-wing.

And the TIE Interceptor has boost and barrel roll, so if the PS1 Interceptor isn't viable, then the PS2 X-wing certainly is not either.

So, it seems as though (inherently flawed and limited in scope) mathematical models are once again declaring ships to be entirely "not viable".

It's this kind of cynical, statistic-driven analysis that has led - over the last 12 months - to a self-fulfilling prophecy of a meta. Entire ranges of ships, pilots and upgrades are ruled out wholesale because they're considered (under the said inherently flawed and limited in scope model) to be marginally less "efficient" than their cousins.

New players pick up the game, gaze in awe at the wealth of options available, join a forum to find out more and are told "yeah, don't use that unless you want to lose."

TIE swarms became the norm because we're told they're "efficient". BBBBZ becomes the norm because we're told it's "efficient". At the expense of everything which is apparently not.

This (incredibly well designed and balanced) game is packed to the brim with an absolute wealth of options and variety, and yet the dogged pursuit for perceived optimum "efficiency" appears to be stifling those options and killing off that variety. So here's a novel approach: to hell with so-called mathematical efficiency; whatever happened to fun?

It's this kind of cynical, statistic-driven analysis that has led - over the last 12 months - to a self-fulfilling prophecy of a meta. Entire ranges of ships, pilots and upgrades are ruled out wholesale because they're considered (under the said inherently flawed and limited in scope model) to be marginally less "efficient" than their cousins.

New players pick up the game, gaze in awe at the wealth of options available, join a forum to find out more and are told "yeah, don't use that unless you want to lose."

TIE swarms became the norm because we're told they're "efficient". BBBBZ becomes the norm because we're told it's "efficient". At the expense of everything which is apparently not.

TIE swarms became the norm because they won. BBBBZ has become the norm because it wins. Swarms were good LONG before Major Juggler ever posted his jousting analysis, and the evolution from TIEs to Bs is a natural one.

I disagree with a lot of Juggler's analysis, but this is pretty much total BS. If something else were super-awesome and the statistics just didn't show it, then people like you would play it, and it would surprise everyone by winning. Predictive models that turn out to be wrong don't survive contact with reality.

Honestly, THIS is what's tiring - the idea that every problem with the game is just because people are playing it wrong. No, turrets weren't only on top because of Phantom fear, they were on top because the combination of things they do well is basically broken. People aren't playing BBBBZ because Major Juggler told them to, they're playing it because it brings 14 guns and 36 HP to the board.

The simple reality is that there are things in this game that are better than others. There's always half-baked silliness like this going on about how many more viable options there are, but the good keeps being good. Common wisdom or MathWing or whatever you want to blame for the game's failings this week may, possibly, point people to certain builds, but if they don't win they don't stay with them.

Emphasis mine:

I've won with three deltas before as have loads of others so obviously maths isn't deciding squat.

[citation needed]

And yet 9 hull autoceptor lists with the exact same number of attacks have been doing great against turret lists.

[citation needed]

I didn't neglect player skill, I just pointed out that there are limits to margins of error, and that there are builds which are so disadvantageous that player skill cannot be expected to overcome it.

... and I stay a billion miles away from the people who insist on using these ships with the up to the second meta-bettah-builds.

I never said I was personally obsessed with Mathwing, I barely understand how to make it work when I want to use it. Rather, I was pointing out that Mathwing provides a service - it tells you how mathematically efficient certain ships are. If you don't want to know how mathematically efficient they are, then fine. There are those who think that Mathwing makes the "meta" by somehow cajoling competitive people into playing min-max lists, but we all know that all of the competitive players are min-maxing with or without Mathwing, it's just a source of information. Moreover, as I said in my first post, Mathwing gives us a language for understanding why some ships seem to be more successful than others which enables the game designers to balance the game more accurately, thus increasing diversity of ships over time. That's all.

Oh I know, and I agree with you too. I like the math in that regard and Juggies is cool in my book.

I do not just blindly pick a ship cause it wuz in Star Wars and me likes it.

I pick ships and build list to tell my badass STAR WARS stories.

I know what these ships can do plenty well indeed, and the math helped a bit in that regard, of course.