JoeBoss Logic:
Conclusion: We should divide the community and get rid of those evil competitive players so that they cannot divide the community.
With X Wing (and to a less extent Armada) the main problem I see with the competitive vs casual crowds is that there are effectively NO third party tournaments. All events are FFG events, and all FFG events are run the same way.
How so? If I want to run an event at my FLGS that uses a narrative format, then I'm entirely free to do so, and I can use FFG kits as prize support for those events if I want to. The FFG police does not conduct a raid and haul me off to Minnesota if I stray from their tournament format.
When I arrange a game of 40K I ask my opponent what sized game he'd like to play, and then we randomly select a scenario. This makes the gap between competitive and casual play much smaller than it is in X Wing and Armada, and that's something that FFG should be doing. Their biggest sin, IMO, is their tournament format.
The thing is, many people are quite okay with the standard formats, to the point that when I suggest something different I'm frequently met by crickets. That is not FFG's fault. In fact, FFG encourages alternative styles of play. In X-Wing, they published narrative scenarios with some of their bigger expansions, and they put up an online scenario bank for people to upload their different formats to in order to share ideas. Just because people did not make much use of it does not mean that FFG didn't try, and it certainly doesn't mean that they force people to play their way or the highway.
Even now your offensive and condescending name-calling--stating that these members of the community are "terrible types of people," while on the other hand people that snicker and shame and judge how others choose to enjoy the hobby (like you) are "cool people"--is really divisive, as you try and make a point about a more inclusive community.
But rest assured that you have successfully driven multiple people I know in the X-Wing/Armada community off of the FFG boards because they now view it as a pointless, hostile, wretched hive of troll and villainy with not enough meaningful content-to-noise ratio.
Wow, if you think Joe Boss Red Seven is an internet troll, or that the FFG boards are vicious, then your tolerance levels must be really low. I've been reading him for two years now and generally think of him as a happy warrior for his cause.
Even now your offensive and condescending name-calling--stating that these members of the community are "terrible types of people," while on the other hand people that snicker and shame and judge how others choose to enjoy the hobby (like you) are "cool people"--is really divisive, as you try and make a point about a more inclusive community.
But rest assured that you have successfully driven multiple people I know in the X-Wing/Armada community off of the FFG boards because they now view it as a pointless, hostile, wretched hive of troll and villainy with not enough meaningful content-to-noise ratio.
Wow, if you think Joe Boss Red Seven is an internet troll, or that the FFG boards are vicious, then your tolerance levels must be really low. I've been reading him for two years now and generally think of him as a happy warrior for his cause.
Eh, no one's left because he's too offensive or risque or anything.
It's just the signal-to-noise ratio of these boards is really low, and spammed emoji cartoons blowing up posts is certainly a part of that.
With X Wing (and to a less extent Armada) the main problem I see with the competitive vs casual crowds is that there are effectively NO third party tournaments. All events are FFG events, and all FFG events are run the same way.
How so? If I want to run an event at my FLGS that uses a narrative format, then I'm entirely free to do so, and I can use FFG kits as prize support for those events if I want to. The FFG police does not conduct a raid and haul me off to Minnesota if I stray from their tournament format.
People love to do things officially. FFG has very explicitly stated what the 'official' competitive format is, and there is only one format, with one set of terrain, one scenario and one game size.
Of course people are free to run any kind of event they wish, but no one ever does. All events are 100 point, 6 rock deathmatches.
There is no where NEAR the variety of events that you see in other wargames, and I attribute that mostly to the fact that FFG goes out of their way to tell us how to run tournaments. People don't want to deviate from that.
Only played x-wing a couple of times before I bought armada and that was it.
As to tactics and strategy I see it like this. You build a fleet and it fights a battle, that's tactical fleet battle. If you and your opponent use 2000-4000 pts. for ships to break into fleets and have a solar system map to deploy and move them, that's strategic. When you maneuver fleets into battles you resolve it tactically.
That's really simplified, and I apologize if it seems condescending
With X Wing (and to a less extent Armada) the main problem I see with the competitive vs casual crowds is that there are effectively NO third party tournaments. All events are FFG events, and all FFG events are run the same way.
How so? If I want to run an event at my FLGS that uses a narrative format, then I'm entirely free to do so, and I can use FFG kits as prize support for those events if I want to. The FFG police does not conduct a raid and haul me off to Minnesota if I stray from their tournament format.
People love to do things officially. FFG has very explicitly stated what the 'official' competitive format is, and there is only one format, with one set of terrain, one scenario and one game size.
Of course people are free to run any kind of event they wish, but no one ever does. All events are 100 point, 6 rock deathmatches.
There is no where NEAR the variety of events that you see in other wargames, and I attribute that mostly to the fact that FFG goes out of their way to tell us how to run tournaments. People don't want to deviate from that.
Yes, having a go-to format makes for an easy default. However, the tournament kits suggest that you're free to set your own rules for the event and do what you think will work best for your community.
Would it be better if they gave shoddy guidelines on how to run a tournament?
And even so - in the tournament rules it says that there are three levels of play: Premier, Competitive, and Casual. Premier consists of Regional Championships, National Championships, and World Championships. So, just a handful of events per year. Competitive consists of Store Championships and one-off FFG-sanctioned events - basically one tournament per store per year. The rest is casual - and you can run it however you want. Let's also remember that for X-Wing they have an Epic tournament ruleset, which is a different format. Maybe they'll have something similar for Armada in a few years.
My stores tend to buy about 2-3 kits per season. Which means that at these stores there are about 6-10 events per year, of which only one is competitive-level event, and the rest are as casual or alternative as you would like to make it.
I agree with you that people tend to play in a narrow way, and I am also disappointed by that. But if that's just because FFG have written a good ruleset for tournaments which appeals to competitive players, then I can't really fault FFG. It's good that they have a well-written ruleset that appeals to competitive players.
There's just very little that FFG can do to encourage other styles of play that really translates into something effective. That's not FFG's fault, that's just the nature of the beast.
The problem IMO is that they have created tournament rules at all. This gives people an official way to play, and people are very loathe to stray from anything 'official'.
If FFG had set NO tournament rules at all, and left it entirely up to the players to determine how they want to play, I think we would have seen a lot more diversity and a much narrower divide between competitive and casual play.
The problem IMO is that they have created tournament rules at all. This gives people an official way to play, and people are very loathe to stray from anything 'official'.
If FFG had set NO tournament rules at all, and left it entirely up to the players to determine how they want to play, I think we would have seen a lot more diversity and a much narrower divide between competitive and casual play.
I disagree.
We would see no tournaments, and no ongoing support, and with the way releases have been for Armada, there would be more complaints.
The problem IMO is that they have created tournament rules at all. This gives people an official way to play, and people are very loathe to stray from anything 'official'.
If FFG had set NO tournament rules at all, and left it entirely up to the players to determine how they want to play, I think we would have seen a lot more diversity and a much narrower divide between competitive and casual play.
That's maybe true, but for all my desires for more narrative play, I'm glad that they have tournament rules and that there's a supported tournament scene.
However, what strikes me as odd in these comparisons to other games reegsk is arguing that the division between casual/imaginative-style players and WAACers comes out of 40K, whereas you're saying that the other games don't have that.
Since I'm not familiar with those other communities, I can't speak to that question one way or the other. We may also be talking about two different divisions. ('Imaginative vs. non-imaginative' as against 'casual vs. WAAC'.)
I bought into Armada. It's a great game. But I realized it's a casual game only. It takes too long to play a tournament in one day. It takes up a lot of space for just one match. Most game shops can't commit to either of those. But it did take everything that is wrong with X-Wing and improve on it. But after so many month of no competitive play I ended up selling out. I do kind of miss it though.
I would disagree with this. I've played 40k and WHFB tournaments for a decade. They take longer to set up and just as long to play as a game of Armada, yet almost every non-convention tournament is a one day affair. It's actually easier for a game store to run an Armada tournament than a 40k one. You're talking a smaller play area (6' x 3' as opposed to 6' x 4') and you don't have to worry about all of the shelf space for terrain. As for setting up the table, you place six pieces of cardboard and you're done. Just setting up terrain for a Warhammer round can take ten minutes, and that's not including the twenty minutes you spend deploying, trying to check true LoS so you can make sure your units are in cover. They say 135 minutes for an Armada tourney round, but the two tourneys I've been to saw only a single pairing going almost to time in a single round. It's a pretty quick game compared to other games I've played. It's definitely a lot longer than X-Wing, though.
The problem IMO is that they have created tournament rules at all. This gives people an official way to play, and people are very loathe to stray from anything 'official'.
If FFG had set NO tournament rules at all, and left it entirely up to the players to determine how they want to play, I think we would have seen a lot more diversity and a much narrower divide between competitive and casual play.
That's maybe true, but for all my desires for more narrative play, I'm glad that they have tournament rules and that there's a supported tournament scene.
However, what strikes me as odd in these comparisons to other games reegsk is arguing that the division between casual/imaginative-style players and WAACers comes out of 40K, whereas you're saying that the other games don't have that.
Since I'm not familiar with those other communities, I can't speak to that question one way or the other. We may also be talking about two different divisions. ('Imaginative vs. non-imaginative' as against 'casual vs. WAAC'.)
I think it's a local meta issue. Apparently the one in my area went hyper competitive over time, but glad to see that's not the case nationally. 40k can be such a fun game to play, unfortunately the local meta sucked most of the fun out of it for me.
However, what strikes me as odd in these comparisons to other games reegsk is arguing that the division between casual/imaginative-style players and WAACers comes out of 40K, whereas you're saying that the other games don't have that.
Since I'm not familiar with those other communities, I can't speak to that question one way or the other. We may also be talking about two different divisions. ('Imaginative vs. non-imaginative' as against 'casual vs. WAAC'.)
I guess there's a lot of difference aspects to consider.
But when I say the gap between competitive and casual players is narrower in 40K (and other games) what I mean is that when I play a game of 40K, no matter how competitive it is, I will have negotiated a points value prior to the game. I may be playing one of the 12 official competitive scenarios, or I could be playing a completely home-brewed scenario that I've only been made aware of ten minutes ago.
Whereas in X Wing (and to a less extent Armada) all games are played at the same size. Almost without exception, across the board, everyone plays the 100 points limit. Some people play epic games, but even then they tend to stick rigorously to the official 300 point limit for epic. And as you approach the pointy end of the competitive bell curve, the more stringently the official rules are upheld. The concept of playing a 150 point game just blows peoples minds. The fact that a 150 point tournament might exist is a real shock to people. Yet in 40K people play competitively at anything from 500 to 2000 points, so there is no official standard points size to cause the game to become stale and repetitive like in X Wing.
At least Armada has objective cards, but even then we're stuck with the same terrain, the same deployment, the same points size in every game.
BORING!
A tournament scene will always exist for these games. But I despair at the fact that the official FFG tournament scene is so stale, and so dominant that it's stale-ness carries over into regular games. Had FFG encouraged a more open attitude to competitive games ("Tournaments can be run at any points size, but we find games between 300 and 600 to be the best") instead of promoting the 400 point limit as the official way to play, I think we would ALL have benefited greatly.
Now, competitive 40K is an absolute ***********. The divide between casual and competitive though, stems from imbalances between units (where some are amazing, and some are awful) instead of style and approach to the game. A competitive 40Ker is usually happy to play a range of scenarios and a range of points sizes, he just wants to do it with the best list available to him. Likewise the casual gamer is happy to play a range of scenarios and points sizes, the differences is that he wants to play with the units he thinks are cool instead of the ones that win games.
Contrasted to X Wing and Armada where the casual gamer wants to play a range of scenarios and points sizes, but the competitive gamer only wants to play 100 points deathmatches and has no interest in different scenarios. The divide now stems from both the units people want to take (the cool ones vs the ones that win games) AND from the way they play the game (scenarios and points sizes vs 100/6 deathmatch every game).
And to reiterate, I think the main reason the 100/6 format (or the 400 point format for Armada) is so popular is because it's the official standard. People love to be official and they love to be standard. No one wants to be different, because what if it's not as good? Most people are pretty risk averse, especially when it comes to their leisure time, and especially when they'd be giving up something they KNOW is good and that they KNOW they like (the official game mode) for something that they might not like as much.
And to reiterate, I think the main reason the 100/6 format (or the 400 point format for Armada) is so popular is because it's the official standard. People love to be official and they love to be standard. No one wants to be different, because what if it's not as good? Most people are pretty risk averse, especially when it comes to their leisure time, and especially when they'd be giving up something they KNOW is good and that they KNOW they like (the official game mode) for something that they might not like as much.
Okay, I think I agree with that.
It doesn't make me feel that FFG should not have created the standard-play ruleset - I think that the competitive aspect of the game is healthy for it (in terms of the volume of people brought to the game), and I think that the competitive players (at least in my area) are sportsmanlike and good guys to play with/against.
But I think you're right that it makes anything other than the standard-play format harder to break out of. But that doesn't make it impossible. I hosted an Epic X-Wing tournament with an alternate ruleset that was narrative-driven (the Rebels had to get their huge ships off the far side of the board, and the Imperials had to stop them), and I had a good crowd show up.
I've also hosted a more-standard tournament, except that I seeded more to prevent too many mirror matches, and I put the names of star systems at each table, which corresponded to systems on a map.
Once I survive the current quarter at school, I'm going to put together an Armada event that makes use of a tournament kit, but is also embedded in a narrative.
The problem IMO is that they have created tournament rules at all. This gives people an official way to play, and people are very loathe to stray from anything 'official'.
If FFG had set NO tournament rules at all, and left it entirely up to the players to determine how they want to play, I think we would have seen a lot more diversity and a much narrower divide between competitive and casual play.
That's maybe true, but for all my desires for more narrative play, I'm glad that they have tournament rules and that there's a supported tournament scene.
However, what strikes me as odd in these comparisons to other games reegsk is arguing that the division between casual/imaginative-style players and WAACers comes out of 40K, whereas you're saying that the other games don't have that.
Since I'm not familiar with those other communities, I can't speak to that question one way or the other. We may also be talking about two different divisions. ('Imaginative vs. non-imaginative' as against 'casual vs. WAAC'.)
I just want to note that WAAC is a pejorative. Your division (unless you intend to bias it), should really be 'casual vs. competitive' for the proper antonym. The reason WAAC is a pejorative is because it grows out of a mindset that competitive play is wrong. It presumes that putting winning ahead of, say, theme or narrative in a list, is wrong - hence the "Win at all costs". It's saying that the player concerned doesn't care about fairness, feelings, fun, only winning at any cost. That's really not the mindset of a competitive player like myself and the way you get called a WAAC player as a put down over and over in the WH40K community, is one of the reasons I greatly dislike a lot of the WH40K community. I'm fine with people wanting to set up games based around a story, or a theme. I'm totally fine with someone wanting to use an assault force of Howling Banshees because they think the background or models are cool and I place blame for the fact that they can't without their opponent voluntarily self-limiting on Games Workshop's utter absence of play-testing. However, I got really tired of being told I was a WAAC and that I was somehow psychologically flawed because of my 'compulsive need to win'. And yes, I'm not exaggerating. Get into a discussion on DakkaDakka for example, and you will be told such things many times if you argue problems of GW's lack of balance. I pity the person who wants to use a Tau gunline because they actually LIKE those models and bought them. Or whatever the latest, greatest meta-king is in WH40K (it's been a while).
Just a note, mainly for clarification and certainly not personal. But WAAC is an insult towards competitive players, not a classification of them.
Edited by knasserIII'd agree that the usage of 'WAAC' in that example is probably not the most suitable, but I would categorically disagree with that assessment of WAAC in the first place.
WAAC is not a universal pejorative term for competitive players, it is a term for a very specific subset who can give competitive players a bad name. (And when I mean 'bad name', you will hear legends of these kind of near-clinical sociopathic sorts). The term is casually thrown around on 'those' websites, because it's just easier to vilify a person for it. But the same can be said for almost anything: it's the internet, where the more wild the speculation and more extreme the accusation, the greater the chance that someone is going to pay attention compared to something well reasoned and restrained.
More of a diatribe below:
One can be a competitive player without being a beardy/cheesy player, and one can be a beardy/cheesy player and not be a WAAC player. It takes a special sort of hellion to manage the selfishness that arises from the real WAAC complex. I've dealt with true WAAC players, the 'stomp the prospective newcomer into the dust' type and worse (what do they call it now, 'baby seal clubbing'?).
Anecdote time: when I was getting back into 40K, I asked about how flyers worked in a friendly game at the shop; no stakes no nothing, Just 'I have this, now how -exactly- does this work differently in X vs. Y situation?” “Oh I'll show you.” and promptly moves the model to a spot as I watch. He then proceeds to use 'skyfire/interceptor' and blows it to pieces, having moved it 'with my implied consent' and conveniently, just far enough that everyone inside was dead. It turned out there was also another option that he could have told me about that is a core concept of 'flyers' work, and wouldn't have brought my unit into range.
We're not talking 'I'm designing a list with X because it's really good' we're talking about 'I will withhold information or interpret the situation in ways explicitly to give a favourable advantage to myself.” You don't have to be obnoxious to do that and it is certainly different compared to standard competitive players. It's also often more apparent outside of the event venues: WAAC, from everything I've seen in 20 odd years of playing, basically doesn't distinguish between a friendly local game and top table at a national championship.
40K's massive dividing line between casual and competitive likely lies in the gap in functionality of many of their options as a result of a complicated, often ambiguous, and heavily nuanced system when it comes to the manners in which statistics, items, and special rules interact. This all shifts the natural internal and external balance of the factions involved which makes it more apparent in the casual vs. competitive settings. 40K exasperates those issues, where as a game like Armada is far less pronounced. I've no comment on X-wing at a highly competitive level as I simply lack the experience to even give a reasonable anecdote.
Edited by VykesVykes, I think you explained it much better than I have. The WAAC archetype that you describe has several people matching it in my area. Or, at least, it used to. I haven't played 40k in two years, but from what I hear it hasn't changed. The three biggest offenders I can think of are:
- The guy I mentioned before bringing the most unbalanced combination of daemon special characters in a for fun narrative campaign. I should also mention he built the entire army out of greenstuff because he didn't want to actually pay for his army. And I'm not knocking custom built models, here. We have one or two amazing sculpters. These did not look good, and he was very open about the fact that he did it because green stuff is cheaper than models, and didn't care how they looked.
- A Blood Angels player with a foot slogging army who used a Warmachine Reach template to ensure every model was exactly 2" from every other model so they were in coherency but would reduce blast damage. Every. Time. He. Moved. With an army that had about sixty infantry models. And this was in friendly games. Had it been in a tournament, I would have called him for slow play. He also insisted that if you assaulted his Baal Predator from the front, you couldn't actually attack it. See, he had a dozer blade attached. But it "didn't count as part of the hull", so you weren't in range to attack the tank, but since it was part of the model, you couldn't put your models on top of it because that would be overlapping an enemy model. And since you have to use the shortest possible route to assault, you had to move into base with the dozer from the front. So it was simultaneously "not part of the hull" but also "part of the model that can't be overlapped."
- And an Ork/Tyranid player who was an expert at min/maxing and would re-measure your distance almost every time you moved, re-measure your blast distance scatter, and roll his dice so fast you couldn't actually see and confirm his rolls before he picked them up. Then he would rules lawyer you to death on everything.
- And the guy who would "forget" things. Forget rules, forget that he had already moved a model/shot with a unit, and forget how many wounds his model had already suffered. He would also insist on the dumbest things. An example - his Unit A suffers fire from Unit B though a piece of terrain, and he claims cover. Then he fires Unit A at Unit B through the same piece of terrain without moving, and claims Unit B doesn't get a cover save (this was back before True LoS). I watched a player I've known for years, who used to work for GW and never once got upset about a game literally trembling in frustration.
That's four people, which doesn't sound like a lot, but consider that an average tournament for us was about ten to twelve, you're talking almost half of the tournament playing community. We'd also have a guy who would come in from out of town with the latest 'net list for almost every tourney, but he was actually fun to play against. The last tourney I attended, he spent the entire time talking about how his Tau army legally breaks the core rules of the game. So you could say he falls into this category or not, but I would say not because he wasn't a jerk about it.
And that "grind newbies into the dust" mentality seems to have bled over into X-Wing. Since no one plays Armada yet, it's impossible to say whether that'll happen here too, but I'm going to try like hell to make sure people remain competitive but without going full-on WAAC.
I'd agree that the usage of 'WAAC' in that example is probably not the most suitable, but I would categorically disagree with that assessment of WAAC in the first place.
WAAC is not a universal pejorative term for competitive players, it is a term for a very specific subset who can give competitive players a bad name. (And when I mean 'bad name', you will hear legends of these kind of near-clinical sociopathic sorts). The term is casually thrown around on 'those' websites, because it's just easier to vilify a person for it. But the same can be said for almost anything: it's the internet, where the more wild the speculation and more extreme the accusation, the greater the chance that someone is going to pay attention compared to something well reasoned and restrained.
More of a diatribe below:
One can be a competitive player without being a beardy/cheesy player, and one can be a beardy/cheesy player and not be a WAAC player. It takes a special sort of hellion to manage the selfishness that arises from the real WAAC complex. I've dealt with true WAAC players, the 'stomp the prospective newcomer into the dust' type and worse (what do they call it now, 'baby seal clubbing'?).
Anecdote time: when I was getting back into 40K, I asked about how flyers worked in a friendly game at the shop; no stakes no nothing, Just 'I have this, now how -exactly- does this work differently in X vs. Y situation?” “Oh I'll show you.” and promptly moves the model to a spot as I watch. He then proceeds to use 'skyfire/interceptor' and blows it to pieces, having moved it 'with my implied consent' and conveniently, just far enough that everyone inside was dead. It turned out there was also another option that he could have told me about that is a core concept of 'flyers' work, and wouldn't have brought my unit into range.
We're not talking 'I'm designing a list with X because it's really good' we're talking about 'I will withhold information or interpret the situation in ways explicitly to give a favourable advantage to myself.” You don't have to be obnoxious to do that and it is certainly different compared to standard competitive players. It's also often more apparent outside of the event venues: WAAC, from everything I've seen in 20 odd years of playing, basically doesn't distinguish between a friendly local game and top table at a national championship.
40K's massive dividing line between casual and competitive likely lies in the gap in functionality of many of their options as a result of a complicated, often ambiguous, and heavily nuanced system when it comes to the manners in which statistics, items, and special rules interact. This all shifts the natural internal and external balance of the factions involved which makes it more apparent in the casual vs. competitive settings. 40K exasperates those issues, where as a game like Armada is far less pronounced. I've no comment on X-wing at a highly competitive level as I simply lack the experience to even give a reasonable anecdote.
So in summary, when I responded to a poster who wrote "casual vs. WAAC", I was correct to say that the opposite of casual players is the competitive player, not the WAAC player and correct in saying that WAAC is a pejorative since you agree that both WAAC isn't the same as competitive play and is also the sort of person who gives others a bad name (your words).
I think I get your point - you're wanting to say that WAAC is not just a pejorative term for a competitive player. I would agree with that much, but it is very frequently levelled at competitive players as an insult in the WH40K community. There, perhaps it is even semi-appropriate (much as I resented being called it) because the game is so flawed that without self-imposed holding back, it breaks. But outside that community, people shouldn't think in terms of Casual vs. WAAC.
Edited by knasserIIPerhaps this thread should be renamed the "WH40K has a problem" thread? 
In reply to the X-Wing tournament format discussion:
Like Mikael said, 100pts deathmatch is the go-to format, but it is suggested in the tournament kits that you go with your own set of rules. It is up to the TO. 100 pts is the default format, but there is also escalation, epic and team epic. I've seen some place organizing a Hunger Game tournament where you only fly one ship against everybody else, or other place that use the tournament kit to run a league instead of a 1 day event. You could decide as a TO to make a tournament using one of the multiple scenario that come with both Core Set and every large ship.
But why is the 100 format the favorite of almost everyone? Because it is the most balanced. The competitive X-Wing community wants a balanced game with as few as possible bad match-up game. You build a team for one purpose, and one purpose only: to destroy the enemy. If you include scenario, or secondary objective that can vary from game to game, you move closer to a rock, paper, scisor game where the team you'll pick might lose badly in some scenario.
Now, I understand that some players might find the 100 deathmatch boring, but that's essentially the same as a chess tournament. There is one objective, and one objective only in Chess, to Checkmate the opponent's King. There is no secondary objective like moving 3 pawn all across the board, it's a game of positioning with always the same objective. In X-Wing, you know what you'll have to do so you'll build and play accordingly. So, some people might find it boring, but judging by the always growing popularity of the game, I don't think that's a problem. To each their own.
...
Now I'm curious, what is it these days with comparing games with X-Wing? The same happened about 2 weeks ago in the Imperial Assault forum asking if the game would have been more popular if it came before X-Wing, as if the success of X-Wing was the reason why the game have some trouble catching on.
I think Red Castle nailed it in that second paragraph. The 100 point Deathmatch was what the game was designed around, and thus is the most balanced. It would be very, very difficult to add Armada-esque objective cards into X-Wing at this point, because the original game mechanics were not designed to include them. So there would be ships created before the objectives that would be unbeatable at some and completely inept at others. I almost wonder if they didn't realize how big X-Wing was going to get? I wonder if they didn't foresee it becoming one of the most popular tabletop games with a massive international appeal, so they didn't think about things like creating multiple scenarios/objectives that would be balanced in tournament play, because they didn't think it would explode this much.
Maybe coming up with home-brewed scenarios that are still somewhat balanced will get people to come into it with a different mentality. Or just make them goofy as hell. One of the most talked about tournaments in my area was a "Golf" tournament where the player with the lowest total Victory Points won. You had to shoot if you could shoot and assault if you could assault, but otherwise you were trying to build the least effective force possible. I think the guy who won was the one who loaded his entire army into skimmers and tried crashing them into terrain at max speed. And that was years ago.
Ultimately, though, X-Wing is great at what it is, and you only have to change the tournament mission if you're looking for something different, not if you're looking for balance. And that's what a lot of other games suffer from, IMO. Lack of balance.
Every time i see people talk about 40k it just sounds like a terrible game system, and it seems like everyone who has played it was left with lingering mental scars.
I almost wonder if they didn't realize how big X-Wing was going to get? I wonder if they didn't foresee it becoming one of the most popular tabletop games with a massive international appeal, so they didn't think about things like creating multiple scenarios/objectives that would be balanced in tournament play, because they didn't think it would explode this much.
I think this is at least partly the case, especially considering their supply chain issues in the first year or two. I have found it really hard to make balanced objectives for X-wing though, although the way Armada does it has changed the way I think about them. I always tried to make X-wing objectives more strictly thematic, but armada has stuff like getting points for attacking the rear hull zone or getting points for critical hits that are extremely game-y but still work well.
Every time i see people talk about 40k it just sounds like a terrible game system, and it seems like everyone who has played it was left with lingering mental scars.
It is a monster. A deformed, over-fed, scarred and brutally ugly monster. And yet it has the most beautiful DNA you could imagine...
I just want to note that WAAC is a pejorative. Your division (unless you intend to bias it), should really be 'casual vs. competitive' for the proper antonym.
My apologies - I did not explain myself very well, and I think Vykes gets to my intent:
I'd agree that the usage of 'WAAC' in that example is probably not the most suitable, but I would categorically disagree with that assessment of WAAC in the first place.
WAAC is not a universal pejorative term for competitive players, it is a term for a very specific subset who can give competitive players a bad name. (And when I mean 'bad name', you will hear legends of these kind of near-clinical sociopathic sorts). The term is casually thrown around on 'those' websites, because it's just easier to vilify a person for it. But the same can be said for almost anything: it's the internet, where the more wild the speculation and more extreme the accusation, the greater the chance that someone is going to pay attention compared to something well reasoned and restrained.
The two spectra that I was referring to are maybe better referred to as this:
By WAAC, I mean someone who is anti-social - for whom the enjoyment of the opponent is, at best, no concern. So, yes, I absolutely mean it as a pejorative. I have absolutely no use for that type of player, and my community is blessed not to have any such people trolling around. However, I understand that these creatures do exist.
The more interesting spectrum is between narrative and competitive. As I read what they're writing, Joe Boss Red Seven and Chucknuckle are of the narrative kind, where the game should be a reflection of the Star Wars universe, and it's not just a 'game'. The enjoyment comes in a large part from sharing a story with your opponent, who is not an opponent in a zero-sum contest, but is partially engaged in a positive-some collaboration to create a story. I have considerable sympathy for that, because I also yearn for narrative content.
For the competitive player, the enjoyment comes from a more zero-sum contest of ability. The game is a game that is won or lost. Of course, it is not zero-sum in the strict sense, because competitive players would still rather play a game that they lose than not play at all. The thrill of the contest is still enjoyable, and as long as the opponents are friendly towards one another they share the bond of both enjoying the game.
For the narrative player, there may be little difference between the competitive play and WAAC/anti-social player, because they want something collaborative and they're not getting it from the competitive player. That's disappointing and frustrating, especially if the narrative player has invested a lot of imaginative energy into setting up the narrative game to be played.
Does that make it a bit clearer what I mean?
I just want to note that WAAC is a pejorative. Your division (unless you intend to bias it), should really be 'casual vs. competitive' for the proper antonym.
My apologies - I did not explain myself very well, and I think Vykes gets to my intent:
I'd agree that the usage of 'WAAC' in that example is probably not the most suitable, but I would categorically disagree with that assessment of WAAC in the first place.
WAAC is not a universal pejorative term for competitive players, it is a term for a very specific subset who can give competitive players a bad name. (And when I mean 'bad name', you will hear legends of these kind of near-clinical sociopathic sorts). The term is casually thrown around on 'those' websites, because it's just easier to vilify a person for it. But the same can be said for almost anything: it's the internet, where the more wild the speculation and more extreme the accusation, the greater the chance that someone is going to pay attention compared to something well reasoned and restrained.
The two spectra that I was referring to are maybe better referred to as this:
By WAAC, I mean someone who is anti-social - for whom the enjoyment of the opponent is, at best, no concern. So, yes, I absolutely mean it as a pejorative. I have absolutely no use for that type of player, and my community is blessed not to have any such people trolling around. However, I understand that these creatures do exist.
- Narrative vs. Competitive
- Social vs. Anti-social
The more interesting spectrum is between narrative and competitive. As I read what they're writing, Joe Boss Red Seven and Chucknuckle are of the narrative kind, where the game should be a reflection of the Star Wars universe, and it's not just a 'game'. The enjoyment comes in a large part from sharing a story with your opponent, who is not an opponent in a zero-sum contest, but is partially engaged in a positive-some collaboration to create a story. I have considerable sympathy for that, because I also yearn for narrative content.
For the competitive player, the enjoyment comes from a more zero-sum contest of ability. The game is a game that is won or lost. Of course, it is not zero-sum in the strict sense, because competitive players would still rather play a game that they lose than not play at all. The thrill of the contest is still enjoyable, and as long as the opponents are friendly towards one another they share the bond of both enjoying the game.
For the narrative player, there may be little difference between the competitive play and WAAC/anti-social player, because they want something collaborative and they're not getting it from the competitive player. That's disappointing and frustrating, especially if the narrative player has invested a lot of imaginative energy into setting up the narrative game to be played.
Does that make it a bit clearer what I mean?
It does, and I understood what you meant. I just wanted to clarify that a competitive player should not be called WAAC just because they are not a casual player.
For me, and I think most Armada players, we don't tend to mind too much if we win or lose, we're more about the game being good. Losing to a good opponent over a tricky game can be (probably is) more satisfying to me than winning over a weaker opponent - especially if it's an easy victory. It's not the winning, it's the fighting.
I'm probably just scarred from WH40K where if you don't tie one hand behind your back and play with a blancmange on your head, people practically accuse you of trying to spoil their fun. I haven't seen 7th edition, but I think there's even something in there about both players having to agree to the models each other use. Can you imagine in Armada a paragraph stating that if the other player doesn't like you fielding ISD-IIs, that you shouldn't include them in your list! 
But why is the 100 format the favorite of almost everyone? Because it is the most balanced.
I disagree. I think it is the most popular because it is defined as the official standard by FFG. I think, had FFG never told us what the 'standard' game should be, there would be no consensus on the issue and we'd be seeing tournaments all over the place with a wide range of point sizes. I think most of them would hover in the 75 to 125 points value, but there would be nothing like the homogeneity we see at the moment.
And I don't think the game is any more balanced at 100 points than it is at any other points value. We all know what is good in X Wing, and what is bad. Changing the points value simply shifts the parameters a little. It doesn't unbalance the game.