26 minutes ago, AceWing said:

It's not lazy design. How are you supposed to have a dynamic game when it's the same as what you were playing in Wave I? That's how games die really quickly.

If not lazy design than greedy design. Make the newer ships better to force players to buy more. It's a crap move.

The game can be designed without planned obsolenence. It just take more time to play test and balance. More time in design, and a trust that people will like the game and continue to buy even though they don't "need" to.

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If not lazy design than greedy design. Make the newer ships better to force players to buy more. It's a crap move.

No it's not. One, it's a business. Two, stagnant games are unfun.

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The game can be designed without planned obsolenence. It just take more time to play test and balance. More time in design, and a trust that people will like the game and continue to buy even though they don't "need" to.

Prove it. Every game I've come from says otherwise.

9 minutes ago, AceWing said:

No it's not. One, it's a business. Two, stagnant games are unfun.

Prove it. Every game I've come from says otherwise.

Why does it have to be stagnant? I'm saying it can be well balanced.

Heroscape was a game where early units were just as competitive as later ones. Didn't stop me from buying every darn thing they ever put out for the game.

Dreadball is another. I went undefeated at a tournament with a starter box team, and this was in a meta 5 "waves" later.

I'm not ok with knowing that I have to constantly shell out bucks to keep up with the joneses. I still buy new stuff because I want to, I hate feeling like I have to, otherwise be routed off the table.

9 minutes ago, Clancampbell said:

The game can be designed without planned obsolenence. It just take more time to play test and balance. More time in design, and a trust that people will like the game and continue to buy even though they don't "need" to.

Can you uh... maybe point us to this holy grail of game design? I'd love to see this shining and perfect example of balance and longevity that other games can only grovel before

Reality is that any game that releases periodic expansions and cannot significantly alter previous ones will eventually suffer from power creep. Each ship is aiming to be balanced on release but sometimes they'll hit a little high or a little low. But since all upgrades in a wave apply to all previous ships and can only directly help rather than harm them (new upgrades can indirectly hurt a ship but since you don't have to equip them they can never directly harm) the net effect over time will be an increase in overall power. The next wave then needs to target that new average power or be underwhelming which is not a recipe for selling ships, and if you're not selling ships then the game dies.

2 minutes ago, Makaze said:

Can you uh... maybe point us to this holy grail of game design? I'd love to see this shining and perfect example of balance and longevity that other games can only grovel before

Reality is that any game that releases periodic expansions and cannot significantly alter previous ones will eventually suffer from power creep. Each ship is aiming to be balanced on release but sometimes they'll hit a little high or a little low. But since all upgrades in a wave apply to all previous ships and can only directly help rather than harm them (new upgrades can indirectly hurt a ship but since you don't have to equip them they can never directly harm) the net effect over time will be an increase in overall power. The next wave then needs to target that new average power or be underwhelming which is not a recipe for selling ships, and if you're not selling ships then the game dies.

I've pointed two out above. Heroscape and Dreadball. I'm not saying everything they put out was perfect and balance was everywhere. However, things where/are kept in check. In both cases I took units/teams from the starter box, and won a tournament, or made the final cut. Do that in X-wing, it's impossible. Power creep is not unavoidable and can be kept in check.

1 minute ago, Clancampbell said:

I've pointed two out above. Heroscape and Dreadball. I'm not saying everything they put out was perfect and balance was everywhere. However, things where/are kept in check. In both cases I took units/teams from the starter box, and won a tournament, or made the final cut. Do that in X-wing, it's impossible. Power creep is not unavoidable and can be kept in check.

I think the difference is that the early ships came from a design era when FFG tended to overvalue certain things. It's not so much deliberate power creep but correction.

Heroscape is a dead game and I've never heard of Dreadball. Thanks for proving our point.

Google Heroscape Balance. First result is a 93 page thread that you could basically swap out the word "Heroscape" for "X Wing" and get this thread right here. It's full of people complaining about specific units being driven to obsolescence or furiously debating on which of multiple systems of point alterations should be used to restore balance.

Dreadball just funded a v2 Kickstarter to correct issues the original had and in the FAQ they specifically call out balance problems between seasons 1-3 and seasons 4-6.

So really not the best examples.

4 minutes ago, AceWing said:

Heroscape is a dead game and I've never heard of Dreadball. Thanks for proving our point.

Heroscape had a 6 year run and only ended because Hasbro shunted it off to Wizards of the Coast, and those dumb asses only know how to do magic and D&D so they let it die.

Just because you've never heard of Dreadball, doesn't invalidate my point. Expand your gaming horizons, look it up. It's probably the greatest game I've ever played. Try it, you won't be sorry.

9 minutes ago, Clancampbell said:

I've pointed two out above. Heroscape and Dreadball. I'm not saying everything they put out was perfect and balance was everywhere. However, things where/are kept in check. In both cases I took units/teams from the starter box, and won a tournament, or made the final cut. Do that in X-wing, it's impossible. Power creep is not unavoidable and can be kept in check.

Up until Imp Vets hit you COULD take a list from the starter box (well, wave 1 to get howlrunner from the tie fighter pack) and win tournaments.

Just now, VanderLegion said:

Up until Imp Vets hit you COULD take a list from the starter box (well, wave 1 to get howlrunner from the tie fighter pack) and win tournaments.

Crackshot is not in the core set.

3 minutes ago, Makaze said:

Dreadball just funded a v2 Kickstarter to correct issues the original had and in the FAQ they specifically call out balance problems between seasons 1-3 and seasons 4-6.

So really not the best examples.

Again, I never said they were perfect. Yes there were some issues with the latter releases. Still even through 6 "seasons" of releases, one of the original starter box teams was still competitive. (I won a tournament with them) You don't have that with X-wing.

2 minutes ago, Panzeh said:

Crackshot is not in the core set.

I'm talking about full tie swarm, which worked up until u-boats hit, and might have worked again after if not for Defenders. And even the crack swarm is all ships from the first wave, just using some upgrades from later.

1 minute ago, Clancampbell said:

Again, I never said they were perfect. Yes there were some issues with the latter releases. Still even through 6 "seasons" of releases, one of the original starter box teams was still competitive. (I won a tournament with them) You don't have that with X-wing.

Yeah but pretty much every bash team from 1-3 was total trash because the designers didn't quite get how that playstyle would mesh with dreadball's wide open play.

Just now, Clancampbell said:

Again, I never said they were perfect. Yes there were some issues with the latter releases. Still even through 6 "seasons" of releases, one of the original starter box teams was still competitive. (I won a tournament with them) You don't have that with X-wing.

• Not perfect
• Issues with later releases
• After 6 expansions aspects of starter set still competitive

That sounds exactly like X Wing to me

3 minutes ago, Panzeh said:

Yeah but pretty much every bash team from 1-3 was total trash because the designers didn't quite get how that playstyle would mesh with dreadball's wide open play.

Mostly true. However my son did win a tournament with Orx. The poster children for bashy teams. I digress however.

Build a list with nothing but wave 1/original core set. Take it to a tournament. See how you do. Come back here. Tell me there's no problem.

13 minutes ago, Clancampbell said:

Again, I never said they were perfect. Yes there were some issues with the latter releases. Still even through 6 "seasons" of releases, one of the original starter box teams was still competitive. (I won a tournament with them) You don't have that with X-wing.

4 minutes ago, Clancampbell said:

Mostly true. However my son did win a tournament with Orx. The poster children for bashy teams. I digress however.

Build a list with nothing but wave 1/original core set. Take it to a tournament. See how you do. Come back here. Tell me there's no problem.

If a "season" in dreadball coincided with a wave in x-wing (I know nothing about it, so no idea if this is the case), then the comparison would be taking a wave 1 list to a tournament during wave 6. Where tie swarms were still quite competitive with nothing but wave 1 stuff. And it sounds like they're now doing a v2 to fix a bunch of issues instead of continuing on to where we are in x-[wing now (4 releases PAST wave 6), so who knows if they would have had the same starter team still competitive.

I will take a list only composed of the core set, get my ass kicked, come back here and tell you there's no problem.

3 minutes ago, Clancampbell said:

Build a list with nothing but wave 1/original core set. Take it to a tournament. See how you do. Come back here. Tell me there's no problem.

No one is even trying to argue that you can win a competitive tournament these days with only wave 1 stuff, that's a complete strawman argument. Rather we're all saying that the fact that you can't do that is a fairly inevitable consequence of a game that expands in the fashion that X Wing does. That 10+ perfectly balanced (and interesting) expansions are impossible or at least so hard as to be effectively impossible to create in a game with systems as complex as X Wing.

Also, I'd argue that a list of wave 1 ships with later upgrades is perfectly valid. Ships don't have to remain exactly as they are when they released using the exact same set of upgrades for the game to stay balanced. The ships just still need to be able to compete as things release later. The crack-swarm is a perfectly logical and (IMO) acceptable update from the wave 1 TIE swarm to let wave 1 ships compete with the wave 8 u-boat meta.

4 minutes ago, Makaze said:

No one is even trying to argue that you can win a competitive tournament these days with only wave 1 stuff, that's a complete strawman argument. Rather we're all saying that the fact that you can't do that is a fairly inevitable consequence of a game that expands in the fashion that X Wing does. That 10+ perfectly balanced (and interesting) expansions are impossible or at least so hard as to be effectively impossible to create in a game with systems as complex as X Wing.

So what about this? From David's blog. It's indisputable at this point that wave 7-9 are far above the rest.

A TIE swarm using crack shot is a good example of older ships being relevant and keeping up with the meta.

1 minute ago, GreenDragoon said:

So what about this? From David's blog. It's indisputable at this point that wave 7-9 are far above the rest.

On the other hand, almost every wave (2 and 3 look slim) is represented in the top cuts, even if the newer stuff is more common.

This is an interesting argument.

I agree with the assertion that it is impossible to release 10 waves of ships and keep them all balanced enough that none will be abandoned by an educated player-base. I further agree that by the nature of upgrade cards, power-creep is almost inevitable: bad cards won't get used, power cards will get used, and balanced cards will eventually get supplanted by power cards.

That said, I do think it's possible to retro-design to keep balance, including reversing power-creep. FFG has a difficult time with this, though, because of decisions regarding errata and so forth that they only now seem to be revisiting. (I think they are coming around to a good place in their thinking, and I think they have learned a lot about design. This is primarily why I would like to see X-Wing 2.0. I think it will be a better, more stable, game, more easily kept in balance.)

One possible way to do this would be to release cards in a player-base-wide Beta test. Give them to playtesters for however long, then give them to the playerbase (not tourney legal) for six months. Then reevaluate and release. I'm not saying this doesn't have logistical problems -- it does -- but it is an actual workable model for keeping a game reasonably balanced.

1 minute ago, VanderLegion said:

On the other hand, almost every wave (2 and 3 look slim) is represented in the top cuts, even if the newer stuff is more common.

That's an interesting take-away. But you'll see that they are heavily reliant on newer upgrades.
From TLT-Ys past Vader /x1, Crack-BlackSqd TIEs, Biggs, Lambdapilots and so on

So it's more surprising that they have such a low representation, not the other way around.