2 hours ago, Clancampbell said:Stop accepting that planned obsolenence can't be helped. Stop accepting the status quo. Dream bigger, demand better!
So you're positing that X-Wing players, and gamers in general, aren't a demanding bunch, and that we should be more demanding?
Now, there's a novel line! Good times.
My impression of the game is that it is close to a reasonable and wide meta but that the player community is much better at play testing (hence why free enterprise always works best) and a few lists have popped out that have few, if any, bad matchups. This turns around and restricts the competitive meta and in my experience (both playing against and with such lists), the player not using one of these lists (currently paratanni, prev. torp scouts; etc) gets bored and frustrated fast. Lots of threads like this have, and will, pop up as long as we continue to see top 1/4/8/16 slots not consistently filled with 1 to 3 lists or archetypes of list. Paratanni's domination of recent regionals and system opens doesn't require a statistician to recognize a trend. Thanks to the numbers guys in our community we have solid data that supports this observation.
As most are toting this thread as one for ideas.... I think tweaking the game...
So that we don't see one or two lists constantly at the top would make x-wing significantly better. Minimize power creep so older ships still see play. Keep the meta open and diverse.
.... are all the right ways to go. I hope FFG is watching this closely because this is a very good game I hope to continue to play for many years to come.
Nail on the head there Cr0ker. As I've said before, my son hasn't played since wave 1. However, I could give him a rules refresher and one of the top lists and watch him dominate. This can't be good for the game. Being beaten by better players is one thing, being beaten by better lists is another.
38 minutes ago, Cr0aker said:As most are toting this thread as one for ideas.... I think tweaking the game...
So that we don't see one or two lists constantly at the top would make x-wing significantly better. Minimize power creep so older ships still see play. Keep the meta open and diverse.
.... are all the right ways to go. I hope FFG is watching this closely because this is a very good game I hope to continue to play for many years to come.
What is consistently at the top? In November Dengaroo was at the Top of the heap with defenders. In FEBRUARY (read 4 months), dengaroo is nowhere to be seen, defenders are good but not at the top, and mindlink is winning the day. I really fail to see what you mean by lists that are omg so good. If you are attending every regional, I can see how you say this. But if you are going to one or two regionals, 4 or 5 store championships, nationals, and worlds, your "meta" is different for all those events.
Please inform me on what I am missing here. what list has been consistently winning for months? If we are talking about Fat Han, Whisper, 3xJM, then I will agree with you, and those all got promptly nerfed into oblivion when they became a problem.
Of all the meta lists to worry about, Paratanni is pretty simple and powerful but in an interesting way to me. Flying against it feels like the cool maneuver game people say X-Wing should be.
20 minutes ago, Clancampbell said:Nail on the head there Cr0ker. As I've said before, my son hasn't played since wave 1. However, I could give him a rules refresher and one of the top lists and watch him dominate. This can't be good for the game. Being beaten by better players is one thing, being beaten by better lists is another.
Give him paratanni and send him to a regional without practice and lemme know how he does.
1 minute ago, VanderLegion said:
Give him paratanni and send him to a regional without practice and lemme know how he does.
Give me the list, I don't know what all is in it.
Just now, Clancampbell said:Give me the list, I don't know what all is in it.
If the meta is so stagnant and so egregious, you should know whats in it.
Just now, Clancampbell said:Give me the list, I don't know what all is in it.
1 hour ago, Kdubb said:Is power creep necessary for the game to sell or grow?
Indirectly, yes. I would strongly argue that early waves are less powerful is simply that they don't have the same mechanical additions that later waves have. Releasing a new system or tech upgrade does nothing for a wave 1 ship since they don't have those slots while buffing later waves that do. Releasing a new modification or EPT card buffs all waves since they have all of them but doesn't really help earlier waves catch up. So later waves benefit disproportionally from further expansions. Building that into a static price isn't possible since as each wave is released not only the absolute value but even the proportion itself changes. So does wave 10 have to be explicitly better than wave 9 to keep the game healthy? Absolutely not. Do waves have to add interesting new mechanics and features to the game to keep it healthy? Yes, and as an unintended consequence of that we see creep.
Few people (outside free to play mobile games) sit around a table and say "Let's add power creep" while heartily villain laughing. Rather it's a 2nd or 3rd order side effect of otherwise positive changes.
1 hour ago, Stay On The Leader said:I'm afraid that after my experiences across multiple living FFG games I do have a low opinion of their designers.
Mixed feelings. They really need a few more obsessive hardcore number crunchers who know every word of every card by heart than they seem to have. Seeing them misquote cards during worlds commentary or make simple rule mistakes in articles (less of that lately) makes me cringe. At the same time trying to hold them to a higher standard than virtually every other game company out there is able to hit just seems ludicrously unfair. They make some, in hind sight especially, down right bone headed mistakes but despite that they still make better games than the most of the industry.
3 hours ago, player346259 said:Yes, expecting that *every* ship in the game will be competitive at any given time is a highly unreasonable requirement. It just shows that you have no experiences in how customizable living games work.
I have played a LOT if these games in the past 15 years, and NONE of them had this mythical perfect balance which you're describing. There were always ships/units/identities/heroes which were on the top, and others which were basically useless.
X-Wing is actually one of the best balanced games I have encountered in past 15 years, and the developers are going into extraordinary lengths to bring old ships back to the meta. This is definitely not the norm in the industry.
And instead of being grateful for this great game and their amazing efforts, you are spitting fire at them for not being perfect.
I'm sorry, but that is just a clear demonstration of your immaturity as a player as well as a person. Also, please stop posting 2000 words essays into the forum, that is just spamming.
I love how everyone who has a problem with people saying that the game needs improvement continues to completely exclude intelligent conversation about the game mechanics, and would rather resort to calling someone wants to improve the game an immature player. Everyone here is grateful the game exists by the way! And the only people spitting fire here are those like you who refuse to provide meaningful insight to the topic at hand.
I write those "essays" because I like to read and respond to people's comments, and usually by the time I'm able to do that many comments have been left on the thread. I respond in detail, because I think critically about what is being discussed. I'll tell you the same thing I told Luke C; If you don't want to contribute to the conversation at hand, then start your own thread. I'm no longer replying to Luke C because he has not once directly responded to any points that I've brought up in my previous comments.
So I will continue to "spam" the forums with my "essays," because I actually care about the games that I play and like to discuss how they can be improved. Nobody in their right mind should believe any game is perfect, because chances are it isn't. The world would be a much better place if everyone could contribute critical thinking, reasoning, and constructive criticism to solving problems. I've played games of all types for 16 years, and I've found numerous games that were pretty **** balanced. Myself and others have cited examples of this numerous times over, so why don't you go back and read those "essays" and think about what those words are all saying? Preferably before you post another counter-productive comment.
Edited by CosmicCastawayA9018 minutes ago, Luke C said:If the meta is so stagnant and so egregious, you should know whats in it.
Yeah because I can memorize what someone brings to a tournament. Especially with ships I don't own, and frankly don't really want too because I've never seen them in the movies.
3 minutes ago, Clancampbell said:Yeah because I can memorize what someone brings to a tournament. Especially with ships I don't own, and frankly don't really want too because I've never seen them in the movies.
So...you're complaining about the meta being so stagnant but can't even recognize THE top meta list right now? All right...
Just now, VanderLegion said:So...you're complaining about the meta being so stagnant but can't even recognize THE top meta list right now? All right...
If by stagnant you mean the same few lists win all the time, then yes.
I recognize the ships, I just didn't know the exact build for the Parattani list. Like which upgrades the used and what not. However, I'm not sure where those ships come from. The rebels cartoon? Never seen it.
3 minutes ago, Clancampbell said:If by stagnant you mean the same few lists win all the time, then yes.
I recognize the ships, I just didn't know the exact build for the Parattani list. Like which upgrades the used and what not. However, I'm not sure where those ships come from. The rebels cartoon? Never seen it.
Except the same few lists DON'T win every time. Paratanni has won a lot, but it's far from the only one. Looking at the last 20 regionals on List Juggler I see 15 different lists that won. Even if you condense down some similar litss into a single archetype, there's at least 10 or 11 differnet lists that won in those 20 regionals.
In those same 20 regionals, theres 19 different ships represented and 23 different pilots. I'd call that far from a stagnant meta. Pretty sure it's the most diverse meta we've had in a long time, if not ever.
25 minutes ago, VanderLegion said:Except the same few lists DON'T win every time. Paratanni has won a lot, but it's far from the only one. Looking at the last 20 regionals on List Juggler I see 15 different lists that won. Even if you condense down some similar litss into a single archetype, there's at least 10 or 11 differnet lists that won in those 20 regionals.
In those same 20 regionals, theres 19 different ships represented and 23 different pilots. I'd call that far from a stagnant meta. Pretty sure it's the most diverse meta we've had in a long time, if not ever.
Sure Vander, but what do your stupid facts have to do with my feelings?!
I feel like I'm tired of seeing Defenders and Mindlink teams, even though they haven't been around that long (compared to other, more persistant offenders), and I'm upset that X-Wings and TIE Punishers aren't as competitive as these ships, which I've already grown weary of. So as I've clearly demonstrated, the meta is objectively terrible. Why can't you understand that simple logic?!
23 hours ago, Jeff Wilder said: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.
The fundamental problem is that no game company (in my opinion) has the technical capability to properly balance these kinds of games on day 1 release. Just rebooting to a v2.0 is a temporary patch that will quickly unwind once new power creep is introduced afterwards. A public 6 month beta test would be very helpful, and is probably the only real hope they have of balancing the game semi-reasonably, BUT even then you still need to know how to use those data analytics. I don't expect a complex game like X-wing can ever truly be well-balanced unless they pony up to pay for a qualified technical balance director, but that's incompatible with their business model and seems less likely than successfully navigating an asteroid field.
7 hours ago, heychadwick said:I think the problem is that, at the moment, the game has become boiled down to the hard mathematical formula of killing your opponent more efficiently without yourself being killed. The smart people of the world can nail down the type of ships that are viable in a short amount of time. The game comes down to basically being only so many competitive list types that even have a chance of winning. It's just the nature of how the game is at the moment.
The game has always been this way since wave 1 release, it has just taken a while for it to become common knowledge.
6 hours ago, player346259 said:The results from World's and Regionals are showing and extremely healthy meta and balanced by any reasonable standards.
Do you want to know how broken game looks like? 16 players in the top 16 playing the same archetype in the same faction, which happened at the last Netrunner world's. Or having Palpatine+Vader combination dominate the Dark Side in Star Wars LCG for 2 frickin years!
17% Defenders in top 8s is nothing broken, just a sign of strong and popular ship, and great balance..
The fact that 80% to 90% of the pilots are utter garbage competitively, and almost no squad archetype prior to wave 7 is viable, would indicate that the game does not have "great game balance". Just because X-wing balance is better than most or many games out there, does not mean that X-wing has great game balance. It's just not as bad as some other games.
3 hours ago, Draconis Hegemonia said:Should we consider that probably the designers and tester of the X wing, are, most probably better at their jobs than the fandom angry forum screamer?
Should we consider that FFG is doing a fairly good job, in a very difficult task (not perfect, but a nice one)?
Technical game balance is a difficult task. As a general rule, the developers are considerably better at it than most players of the game. However that does not mean they have the expertise to do "a fairly good job" at balance. To do a "fairly good job" by the general playerbase (consumer) standards, is significantly more difficult than most of the playerbase (and likely the game designers themselves) realize.
Edited by MajorJuggler1 hour ago, Luke C said:What is consistently at the top? In November Dengaroo was at the Top of the heap with defenders. In FEBRUARY (read 4 months), dengaroo is nowhere to be seen, defenders are good but not at the top, and mindlink is winning the day. I really fail to see what you mean by lists that are omg so good. If you are attending every regional, I can see how you say this. But if you are going to one or two regionals, 4 or 5 store championships, nationals, and worlds, your "meta" is different for all those events.
Please inform me on what I am missing here. what list has been consistently winning for months? If we are talking about Fat Han, Whisper, 3xJM, then I will agree with you, and those all got promptly nerfed into oblivion when they became a problem.
I'm glad you asked.
http://stayontheleader.blogspot.com/2017/02/many-bothans-died-to-bring-us-this.html
Not an end all to your answer, it is just one of many breakdowns players have made of recent tournament data. What I see consistently at the top involves the Emperor, x7, mindlink, manaroo, zuckess. sabine and not in that order. Looking at the quantitative data makes me think we may see more adjustments (what this thread, in my mind, is calling for).
I am not a great player, don't attend more than 1 or 2 bigger events each year, have never gone to worlds; but can first hand see how some combo's, as they work now, have very few bad matchups and this does restrict the meta.
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Edited by baranidlo29 minutes ago, Cr0aker said:I'm glad you asked.
http://stayontheleader.blogspot.com/2017/02/many-bothans-died-to-bring-us-this.html
Not an end all to your answer, it is just one of many breakdowns players have made of recent tournament data. What I see consistently at the top involves the Emperor, x7, mindlink, manaroo, zuckess. sabine and not in that order. Looking at the quantitative data makes me think we may see more adjustments (what this thread, in my mind, is calling for).
I am not a great player, don't attend more than 1 or 2 bigger events each year, have never gone to worlds; but can first hand see how some combo's, as they work now, have very few bad matchups and this does restrict the meta.
But that's what 3-3.5 months? Rebels, imperials and scum are all winning regionals and making the cut. Yeah my heart is broken that this meta is so restricting.
you have to realize by now that I'm more than happy playing the new ships. If I only brought my xwings and bwings out casually I really don't care. Tournament play is not the only way to play xwing and if I bring something to game night casually and someone brings commonwealth, I'll probably lose, but whatever, I lose all the time. Heck I might bring a wave 2 list to hoth this year. I have fun with xwing because I have reasonable expectations.
7 minutes ago, Luke C said:But that's what 3-3.5 months? Rebels, imperials and scum are all winning regionals and making the cut. Yeah my heart is broken that this meta is so restricting.
you have to realize by now that I'm more than happy playing the new ships. If I only brought my xwings and bwings out casually I really don't care. Tournament play is not the only way to play xwing and if I bring something to game night casually and someone brings commonwealth, I'll probably lose, but whatever, I lose all the time. Heck I might bring a wave 2 list to hoth this year. I have fun with xwing because I have reasonable expectations.
That works if your definition is that 3 factions showed up to play. If you were a numbers guy you might go "huh, defenders made up 51% of all the ships Imperial players brought to the table, I wonder why?" or "attani mindlink was in half of all scum lists... huh".
Nothing in my post alluded to expectations, let alone unreasonable ones. I did point out what my thoughts and impressions were, without shooting from the hip (by referencing some hard data), without making broad brush assertions, or complaining.
37 minutes ago, player346259 said:I think "pilots" is not a very fair metric and also one which is not relevant to the topic at hand which revolved around "ships" being competitive.
73% ships being competitive, with 38% of them being Tier 1 is what I call a pretty frickin good balance, Major Sir.
It's still a fact that 80% - 90% of the pilots aren't competitive, just because you don't personally care doesn't mean the game is balanced. My opinion (and that of most players, I think), is that if FFG is going to print pilot cards for ships, then they should be balanced. If they're going to intentionally make all vanilla generics terrible, spare us the agony of thinking that we can actually employ the "Blair Bunke" style of play, and save the cardboard.
As far as the best-case option for each ship, I think a better delineation for the current meta would be:
REBELS
* Kannan / Biggs / docked shuttle list
IMPERIALS
SCUM
Tier 2 is not consistently competitive at top tables, with the very rare exception of maybe 1-2 very good players in the world who have 200+ reps with a particular list (i.e. Phillip Booth Bro-Bots). If you take a tier 2 list against a tier 1 list, you aren't going to beat a good player unless they mess up.
31 out of 44 ships really shouldn't be seeing the tables for competitive play. 70% of the ships might as well stay in their cases.
Edited by MajorJuggler.
Edited by baranidlo30 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:70% of the ships might as well stay in their cases.
This I find to be evidence of failure in good game design.
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Edited by baranidlo