I am new x wing player, never been to a tourney. But I certainly will some day once I gain a little more confidence. My main game is Advanced Squad Leader (ASL). Been playing it more than 20 years and have been to 50-60 tourneys and won a few. I went thru the same phase with ASL. I have learned to embrace the dice and play the game for fun. I have realized:

If I want to eliminate dice I need to play chess or go or something. I quickly find "my level" and get bored. There are people I can beat and those I can't and there is not a lot of variablity.

In ASL, and in X wing the better player usually wins, but not always. I have to remind myself when I lose because of dice, that there are games I win because of dice. These instances don't seem to stick in my mind as much as the bad stuff, but an objective review will show they exist.

Again, never been to an X tourney, but it seems people go to win, almost exclusively, could be wrong there for sure. But I know in ASL, the tourney structure is different, but people show up to play, drink, see friends, etc...have fun. Sure someone will win, but there are people that go 0-4 or 0-5, or even 0-6 if there that many rounds. But no one leaves early once they lose, they keep playing other losers and just drink a little more.

The tourney declares a winner and there is some gloating of course, but the weekend is much more about just playing and having fun with friends.

If I want to eliminate dice I need to play chess or go or something. I quickly find "my level" and get bored. There are people I can beat and those I can't and there is not a lot of variablity.

I agree I think it's great there are dice, if the ships had fixed amounts of damage and defence I think somebody would spend an inordinate amount of time calculating the best possible combinations, just like chess players memorize tons of different moves and counter-moves.

I think the randomness not only is more fun but by applying skill you can mitigate it, so skillfull players will always do better, on average.

I think we all have to realize that with all the dice we are rolling, even small probabilities happen. just the other day I rolled 5 natural evades followed by 5 natural blanks. chance of evade/blank is 3/8 to the power of 5 it's about 0.7%. so ignoring conditional probabilities and binomial distributions for a moment and just isolating the two rolls, the chance for those 2 events to happen was 0.7 % * 0.7 % = 0.005 %

however if you look at how many dice you're rolling and how many people are rolling dice around you in a tournament, for example, that's a lot of rolls, so very low probabilities do happen on a regular basis.

Well this is why I dont travel for regionals

No point in devoting a day just to get ****** by dice

Not until ffg gives us a squad that can ruin **** just with bombs. Sabine helps but we're not there yet

FGD - I was 1 hull away from making top 4 at the Michigan Regional with bombs... They are most definitely viable right now. But I also have a habit about making strange lists work.

Dice are what make this game have that "rush" feeling you get. Just like gambling. The unknown. What will happen? That is what's addicting. Trying to beat the system with "spend a focus, get a TL shenanigans". Dice are just math, and green dice WILL ALWAYS LOSE to red dice because there are fewer evades on the die. If evades, focuses and blanks were all equal, games could theoretically go on forever!

Why do people go to Vegas and play craps? (Which I do). The math says YOU LOSE! But people want that rush of beating the system, just for that day or weekend. There a million different betting systems in craps, ways to throw the dice, betting patterns, etc. all to reduce the house edge. That is what the tournaments in xwing bring. You want to beat the dice system just for that day. Sometimes you do, sometimes you dont. You modify the dice to best of your ability, but there is still that thing called chance. And that is what makes this game beautiful

If you want pure skill and brains, play chess or Go. Zero luck.

I have pretty much decided to play 1 Agi ships because I keep hearing, man your dice hate you or you have the worst luck...etc. Luck. I usually don't get to excited because I love statistics and I understand EACH dice is individually responsible for the result. But when you hear it so much, what can you do. Fly better and hedge your bets. Maybe the next guy is worse off than you.

Maybe that is why I look at the final match at Worlds differently. Took the gamble. Statistically the dice should have been better and they were not. Corran died. That is why you don't put yourself in that situation.

it's possible statistically for a player to experience a very bad streak of lower than average rolls. however if you keep rolling eventually it will be averaged by a streak of good rolls.

there's no such thing as bad luck, but you may have some bad karma. the best way to obviate that is to be generous. generosity brings about good karma in the end

Yeah, so that second half is a big old pile of bull. Also, you realise that behind your quasi religious moralistic claptrap is the implication that the OP's dice are failing him in his plastic spaceship game is because he is a bad person? Screw that.

OP: What you're experiencing is selection bias driven by the fact that the human brain remembers negative experiences far better than it does positive. There's no basis in fact for luck, good or bad, it's just that you're not remembering the times you do roll evades because a combat round where he rolls hit hit crit and you roll two natural evades off two green dice still results in you losing a shield, and who cares it's just another round of shooting. But if you roll zero evades and he one shots your Phantom with a direct hit, that sticks in your head.

That's probably also why you think only your green dice hate you. Even great red dice rolls probably aren't going to be game defining. If you roll four out of four hits naturally against, say, Biggs, and he rolls evade focus, converts an eyeball and loses two shields, that's not very memorable, despite he fact that it's almost as unlikely as rolling four blanks.

Ultimately, you either have to accept that everyone is dealing with the exact same dice as you are, or fly a list where dice are less significant, as people have suggested.

did I say he was a bad person? you said I implied he was a bad person, because you think bad karma = bad person. that's not true.

it's possible statistically for a player to experience a very bad streak of lower than average rolls. however if you keep rolling eventually it will be averaged by a streak of good rolls.

there's no such thing as bad luck, but you may have some bad karma. the best way to obviate that is to be generous. generosity brings about good karma in the end

Yeah, so that second half is a big old pile of bull. Also, you realise that behind your quasi religious moralistic claptrap is the implication that the OP's dice are failing him in his plastic spaceship game is because he is a bad person? Screw that.

Heheh, but doesn't xbear have a PhD in Nukular Fizziks from Cambridge? We should probably just take his word for it.

so physicists cannot be spiritual or religious? I see. I guess I didn't learn that in Cambridge, my bad. I'll turn in my degree at first occasion, since I don't conform to your established parameters for having a PhD in physics.

I just want to let you know, that if Karma existed I would be ROLLING in good fortune, wealth, and so on. So would my father, and my Great Aunt.

But despite the fact that my father gave eight years of his life to the military, despite the fact that he sacrificed a lot for the needs of others in his circles of friends and family, despite the fact that he constantly goes out of his way to be a good person to others, he gets crapped on all the time.

My Great Aunt? Worked on Asbestos litigation for about 25-30 years. One of the founders of Simmons Cooper LLC. Worked in literally hundreds of cases, if not being involved in thousands of cases, where the point was to stick it to the guys who didn't pay five more cents for a material that wouldn't destroy the lives of their workers, whom they knew would be suffering ill effects in the future- and they did know that! She's suffering from advanced COPD, severe asthma, and recently had a broken spine.

and myself, who, despite having only lived a fraction of either of those two's lives, has pretty much always gone out of his way to be honest, fair, hates doing things that are generally mean spirited, and can't even lie right out of sheer guilt of merely lying? 23. Unemployed. GED. Black sheep.

Take the karma talk and put it somewhere somebody else can ruin their lives with it.

'Karma' is an unsuccessful attempt to embed a set of normative morals in physicaly reality.

They don't belong there, and the funny thing is, if they did belong there, they would no longer be moral considerations.

I have pretty much decided to play 1 Agi ships because I keep hearing, man your dice hate you or you have the worst luck...etc. Luck. I usually don't get to excited because I love statistics and I understand EACH dice is individually responsible for the result. But when you hear it so much, what can you do. Fly better and hedge your bets. Maybe the next guy is worse off than you.

Maybe that is why I look at the final match at Worlds differently. Took the gamble. Statistically the dice should have been better and they were not. Corran died. That is why you don't put yourself in that situation.

only problem with low agi ships is you leave your opponent open to dominating the match by getting lucky with his greens

the only winning move is not to throw dice at all

actually had a great game yesterday with my torp scouts + manaroo v two phantoms and dark curse. One torpedo fired all game; four feedbacks from Manaroo the bumpmaster. No dice required

good bumping helps, though. There's no chance of dying if your injured ships aren't getting shot at

I have pretty much decided to play 1 Agi ships because I keep hearing, man your dice hate you or you have the worst luck...etc. Luck. I usually don't get to excited because I love statistics and I understand EACH dice is individually responsible for the result. But when you hear it so much, what can you do. Fly better and hedge your bets. Maybe the next guy is worse off than you.

Maybe that is why I look at the final match at Worlds differently. Took the gamble. Statistically the dice should have been better and they were not. Corran died. That is why you don't put yourself in that situation.

only problem with low agi ships is you leave your opponent open to dominating the match by getting lucky with his greens

the only winning move is not to throw dice at all

actually had a great game yesterday with my torp scouts + manaroo v two phantoms and dark curse. One torpedo fired all game; four feedbacks from Manaroo the bumpmaster. No dice required

good bumping helps, though. There's no chance of dying if your injured ships aren't getting shot at

Heh, at a Regionals the other day there was a game where I did 3 damage to a Soontir, and all 3 came from Feedback Array. My Brobots have 16 health, I don't mind spending 3 of that to kill your Acewing haha.

OP's mistake was thinking TAPs vs Zs was advantageous for him. He did what he could, getting behind rocks, but there's very little he could have done to avoid the Inquisitor's arc. It was the dice, it was the match up and I suppose the fact the Zs didn't get the alpha strike in the early game.

Also, 'in my experience there's no such thing as luck'.

I have pretty much decided to play 1 Agi ships because I keep hearing, man your dice hate you or you have the worst luck...etc. Luck. I usually don't get to excited because I love statistics and I understand EACH dice is individually responsible for the result. But when you hear it so much, what can you do. Fly better and hedge your bets. Maybe the next guy is worse off than you.

Maybe that is why I look at the final match at Worlds differently. Took the gamble. Statistically the dice should have been better and they were not. Corran died. That is why you don't put yourself in that situation.

only problem with low agi ships is you leave your opponent open to dominating the match by getting lucky with his greens

the only winning move is not to throw dice at all

actually had a great game yesterday with my torp scouts + manaroo v two phantoms and dark curse. One torpedo fired all game; four feedbacks from Manaroo the bumpmaster. No dice required

good bumping helps, though. There's no chance of dying if your injured ships aren't getting shot at

Remind me never to drive around with bumper cars with you.

DICE. I hate them. They hate me. It's mutual.

Sorry guys, just me venting. BTW, I've even tried the star wars Dice app from FFG. It's the same thing. Maybe I have some sort of natural EM interference, lol. Heck if I know. All I do know is I am going to get back to enjoying the game that I used to enjoy instead of beating my head against a wall because, well, DICE.

Thanks for listening.

/vent

Hang in there, I am there with you on the Dice, I roll really terrible when it comes to both, again hang in there. I remember many moons ago I played Warhammer 40K and Fan. I would run Marines and Skaven for both games I would roll terrible it seemed like for a year to 2 years. 40-50 dice for 40K in a shooting turn and 100 upwards for fan (skaven with slings and such). I was about 75% 1 or 2 to come up when anything else was needed. After a time my rolling got better, (I am banking on that now with X-wing ) I think there is a law of avg where you start rolling better to make up for the terrible rolling that took place prior. I really don't believe in Luck in general, I do see trends as a math person and know at some point you would be special to beat the odds and have terrible rolling for life. I mean its stat impossible to roll such a low prop for ever, so that means your special if you do. (not saying that in a bad way)

Something I do that works well is call out what I want the dice to be as its rolling and for some reason it works. This drives most of my friends crazy and they really think I use Magic or the Force... :-)

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.

Yes indeed!

It can always get worse

There is a reason Euro Gamers hate Ameritrash, it is the DICE.

Dice are the enemy, it is the whole reason you make a lot of the building decisions you do, to try to even out the dice randomness. Sounds like it is time for an autothruster accuracy corrector build.

Also, high level play is always rough, in any game. That is why I play for fun... because it is more fun. Plastic spaceships! Like flying A-wings while "push it to the limit" from scarface plays in your head.

It's usually my red dice failing me and my opponent's green dice being very hot.

Ever fired 3 turns in a row, with target-lock and focus, range 1, 4 dice....and got 4 blanks...rerolled into 4 blanks? 3 times in a row? At a major tournament?

I have.

Or you get a great succession of rolls, always ending up with 3 hits/crits without having to modify your dice....but every time your opponent rolls exactly the number of evades needed to escape harm without needing autothrusters or evade/focus tokens?

I have as well.

Sometimes, no matter how good your positioning is, no matter how well you outfly your opponent....when the Dice Gods say "You're gonna lose".....you're gonna lose.

The best positioning and maneuvering in the world can't help you if you can never hit even with fully modded rolls.


But you gotta just keep on keepin' on.

Regionals this year, I had some amazing rolls against a Black Crack Swarm (I think the guy had made top 8 at worlds last year). I lost...hard. I managed to nuke Howlrunner in the first turn of shooting, and then killed a Black Squadron and brought another TIE down to 1 hull.....but each time it was just through 1 shot each. So out of all the turns shooting (and there was a LOT of shooting) I only landed hits 3 times. Yet 90% of my rolls were hit-hit-crit or hit-hit-hit natural.

He always got 3 natural evades except for those three times.

And he literally just pecked me to death. Never got more than 2 hits even at Range 1. I threw him off his game because he didn't realize G1-As had a 4 forward, so they ended up blocking him (which allowed for the turn-2 nuking of Howlrunner) and he had to break formation after that.

But that was dice. I probably still would've lost (I got outflown)....but it would've been a lot closer had his green dice not been on fire.

I've had this conversation with my friends a number of times about games with high variance. Mostly it is in relation to Magic, but the same logic applies here. Basically, because variance does play a pretty significant role in X-Wing you need to play a critical mass of events to really get a gauge on how good you are. The Magic pros spend pretty much all their free time playing Magic, because they need to make sure their own play mistakes don't hamstring them more than the variance already can. This is why, over the last couple years, you'll see a massive increase in cracking down on cheating. Jared Boettcher was the Rookie of the Year, winning an unprecedented amount in his first real season as a Magic pro. It was soon discovered (because the matches are streamed and the video is available) that he was cheating with a shady shuffling technique. He was beating the variance, and he was cheating to do so.

Placing in the Top 8 of a Pro Tour at all is hard, and nearly impossible to do it multiple times in a season, and extremely difficult to do it multiple times in a career. Poker, Magic, X-Wing, and even NASCAR all have a ton of variance that is an artificial equalizer. There is certainly skill in all of those examples, but there is more room at the top because of the variance.

X-Wing is still really young in terms of competitive play. I see a lot of non-meta lists and people trying out new builds in competitive scenarios. For people who hate the meta the bad news is that it will only get worse. The level of competition is going to be higher as time goes on, and flying a meta list is one of the best ways to reduce the variance. This same news is good news for people who like to compete, where the actual ships on the table play second fiddle to the strategy and tactics you use while flying.

That being said, even though I fall into the latter camp I hope FFG ramps up their Scenario production or the community takes responsibility and starts creating fan-made scenarios. This is the major advantage X-Wing has over games like Magic: They can still appeal to the casual crowd even though the competitive scene will only get more difficult to enter.

X-Wing is still really young in terms of competitive play. I see a lot of non-meta lists and people trying out new builds in competitive scenarios. For people who hate the meta the bad news is that it will only get worse. The level of competition is going to be higher as time goes on, and flying a meta list is one of the best ways to reduce the variance.

That being said, even though I fall into the latter camp I hope FFG ramps up their Scenario production or the community takes responsibility and starts creating fan-made scenarios. This is the major advantage X-Wing has over games like Magic: They can still appeal to the casual crowd even though the competitive scene will only get more difficult to enter.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying here. A progressively more intense mets game and tournament scene may push out more and more casual players if nothing is done.

However there are quite a few player-made scenarios out there, some of which are very good. Finding them is really the hard part. There is mission control, ffg's mission building tool; it has probably a thousand scenarios uploaded to it, but browsing is t easy. I suggest that if you're interested in cool scenarios, check out mission control and browse by my name (I have a respectable collection of missions published), and also look for J rhea 's excellent yavin campaign and tournament compatible missions. Searching by the top-liked missions is also not a bad way to look for missions to try out.

There is also the excellent heroes of the Aturi cluster campaign, for an awesome co-op X wing campaign experience.

Finally, keep your eye out for the Shuttle Tydirium Podcast, which should be launching this week. We'll be covering casual X wing play as opposed to tournament play.

I just want to let you know, that if Karma existed I would be ROLLING in good fortune, wealth, and so on. So would my father, and my Great Aunt.

[...]

I'm sorry to hear of your difficulties, I spent the greater part of my life unemployed, and only very recently did I find a more stable job. also my family had its share of serious health problems. I hope things turn for the better for you and your family, soon, and don't give up

The thing about dice. Is that it can't just be dice. Otherwise it wouldn't be the same top players over and over again. Good bough maybe the standard is great players put themselves in position with dice modifiers or out of arc shots to not rely on the randomness of dice.

---

That being said. As probably not even a good player. I don't blame green dice. If I get shot, it's because I was able to be shot. Now if I roll 12 dice from a focused howl tie swarm into a bwing for 3 shields worth of damage. I like to blame red dice.

Something that was suggested to me, fly your list without green dice.

Seriously, just play a couple games where you pretend your tie swarm has a zero agility; and don't roll any evades even with the chance to do so.

It is enlightening in terms of how you play and the strategy changes you make.

Plus, when you get them back, the game seems so easy.

so ignoring conditional probabilities and binomial distributions for a moment

You're my very favorite person on this whole site right now. Scrabble is a great game.

so ignoring conditional probabilities and binomial distributions for a moment

You're my very favorite person on this whole site right now. Scrabble is a great game.

thank you, send cookies

Wait, Xbear was serious about the karma thing? I just laughed when I saw it and didn't think much of it. Religion and games have no connection at all. (Except for games about religion lol).

Wait, Xbear was serious about the karma thing? I just laughed when I saw it and didn't think much of it. Religion and games have no connection at all. (Except for games about religion lol).

karma is not religion. nobody who commented on karma in this thread seems to know or understand karma and how it interacts with free will. it seems you all read what karma is in a two word definition in the back of your morning cereal boxes.

it's like saying kindness is religion because Jesus spoke about kindness. yet you can say be kind to your opponent, fly casual. so there.