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6 minutes ago, player346259 said:

As per my edits in the original post, not all pilots are necesserly designed for top level tournament play. We have Johnny, Timmy and Spike player types and it is fine if some pilots are designed for theme or some combo fun.

But that goes against what Alex Davy has repeatedly said in the past, where they try to make ships and pilots in the "sweet spot" of not too strong and not too weak. This point gets brought up every few months, ignoring what the developers themselves have said on the subject...

Regardless, even if true that approach is only a justification for intentionally poor game balance, it doesn't change the fact that those pilots are imbalanced. In my opinion, designing poor ships is terrible game design. That argument has never made any sense to me whatsoever.

5 minutes ago, player346259 said:

That is no evidence, but result of a rather subjective analysis.

The fact is that any one of us can skew the statistics to his view.

My view is that 73% of the ships are competitive playable, and I believe I could back it up with the data from regional results (let's say couple places in Top 8/16 should qualify the ship for Tier 2 status).

In my 2016 Regionals thread, I was tracking results statistically and visually plotting Squad Archetypes by % occurrence in Top Cuts (x-axis), and post-cut performance (y-axis). There's a fellow that has started to do some stuff with List Juggler data, I would like to have a similar analysis done now as well. Then you don't need to have "subjective" results.

46 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

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.

I'm not going to say generics aren't terrible (for tournament play), and I am not going to say generics are amazing. What I am going to say is that, if you are playing Epic, fielding and remembering to use all the special abilities of all the Aces is nearly impossible (or bogs the game to a crawl).

Generics fill the list out around a few favorite Uniques. The main critique I would have about the generics is that every ship type needs a generic with an EPT slot, so that casual players can have more options to tweak a generic pilot-based squadron.

The math skews differently at 300 points, so in Epic named pilots tend to be less effective. I do wish FFG would do Epic style tournaments, variety is good.

28 minutes ago, player346259 said:

As per my edits in the original post, not all pilots are necesserly designed for top level tournament play. We have Johnny, Timmy and Spike player types and it is fine if some pilots are designed for theme or some combo fun.

Uh, which am I?

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9 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

The math skews differently at 300 points, so in Epic named pilots tend to be less effective. I do wish FFG would do Epic style tournaments, variety is good.

Plus single use cards (like Boba Fett crew, Glitterstim), arc-dodging, and abilities like Palps (which roll do you modify in a turn of 10-20 rolls?).

On ‎2‎/‎15‎/‎2017 at 4:41 PM, Darth Meanie said:

I want to fly fun things, and could care less whether I could win with it. I will fly four rookies, just cuz I want to see them on the table, and my creative challenge to myself is to see if my list can pull off just one cool thing during a game.

16 minutes ago, player346259 said:

Dunno, you gotta find yourself

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-2013-12-03

Clearly, from one of my posts earlier in this thread, I'm Johnny.

Thanks for the reference.

3 hours ago, MajorJuggler said:

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

• Tier 1 (4): K-wing, VCX-100, T-65 X-Wing*, Attack shuttle*
• Tier 2 (7): A-wings, T-70 X-wing, YT-1300, TIE Fighter, Arc-170, E-wing, YT-2400
• Garbage (4): B-wing, HWK-290, U-Wing, Z-95

* Kannan / Biggs / docked shuttle list

IMPERIALS

• Tier 1 (5): Lambda, Defender, Interceptor, TIE-SF, VT-49
• Tier 2 (6): TIE-FO, TAP, TIE Bomber, TIE Advanced, Phantom, Striker
• Garbage (4): TIE Fighter, Upsilon, Firespray, Punisher

SCUM

• Tier 1 (4): JM5000, Lancer, Protectorate, YV-666
• Tier 2 (5): Aggressor, HWK-290, G-1A, M-3A, Y-Wing
• Garbage (5): Firespray, Kihraxz, Quadjumper, StarViper, Z-95

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.

This is highly misleading, as dash beats defenders. I'm almost positive that all your tier 2 ships have won a regional. Also your garbage for scum is off as boba placed highly in a regional and kath sees play with tail gunner. You can't say how good the quadjumper is, there has been 2? Major tournaments? The same goes for a the upsilon.

Just because they don't math right in your system doesn't mean people aren't finding success with them.

Furthermore, if bunke can find success, why can't you? I thought games were decided at the list building phase now?

I think juggler's list is still pretty optimistic in a few of his ratings.. He's definitely erring on the side of positivity not negativity, and many of his ratings are based on like one pilot occasionally being played for a specific niche purpose rather than the ship as a whole being balanced.

4 hours ago, Luke C said:

This is highly misleading, as dash beats defenders. I'm almost positive that all your tier 2 ships have won a regional. Also your garbage for scum is off as boba placed highly in a regional and kath sees play with tail gunner. You can't say how good the quadjumper is, there has been 2? Major tournaments? The same goes for a the upsilon.

Just because they don't math right in your system doesn't mean people aren't finding success with them.

Furthermore, if bunke can find success, why can't you? I thought games were decided at the list building phase now?

As of 2016 Regionals, Dash was under-performing (see below), and nothing has significantly changed there since, although it would be better to have all the underlying data available to analyze for the recent meta.

I must be losing my touch, it has been a while since someone has told me that I can't predict ship success pre-release...

It is normal for ships that are sub-par according to MathWing and general tournament results to still see occasional success. I certainly never claimed otherwise.

Blair has spent several years playing small ship rebel swarms now. He is quite possibly the best on the planet at playing them. He is a perfect example of the kind of player that creates statistical "outliers" as I explained upthread, with the earlier example of Phillip Booth playing his BroBots to a recent Regionals win. The apparent hostility in your list building remark and questioning my tournament success seems unmerited. I'm not a hyper-competitive player that really cares about traveling much for competitive events. I have only played in 5 large events, 32-8 overall.

• 2015 MA Regionals, 15th
• 2015 Pittsburgh Regionals, winner
• 2015 NOVA Open, Top 4
• 2015 Worlds, #20
• 2017 MA Regionals, Top 4

I don't really care if people label that as "successful" or whatever. I have been doing MathWing, making predictions, and ruffling feathers far before I ever played competitively. When I do play competitively I have certainly performed above average, but more importantly I have fun. Taking a lot of personal vacation time to travel for a few hours of X-wing isn't really my thing though, especially lately.

4 hours ago, Stay On The Leader said:

I think juggler's list is still pretty optimistic in a few of his ratings.. He's definitely erring on the side of positivity not negativity, and many of his ratings are based on like one pilot occasionally being played for a specific niche purpose rather than the ship as a whole being balanced.

I agree that list rankings compiled without using the actual underlying numeric data is not rigorous and therefore not really meaningful, including my own ad-hoc list above. A squad archetype's (or ship's) "success" is an analog metric, that includes both how prevalent it is, and how well it does. There is a reduction in information by simply labeling squads as "Tier1 / Tier 2 / garbage". In the 2016 Regionals I started tracking archetype appearance in cuts, and then how well they did post-cut. This provides a much more comprehensive picture because you can see how often something appears, and also how well it does. It can be difficult to tell how a squad's long term success will be if it only appears a couple of times even if it does well. The sample size is too small and can be affected by many things outside of the pure strength of the list itself. Here is an example of the cut appearance rate vs post-cut performance for the 2016 Regionals, weighted by attendance. I would like to get a similar analysis going for more recent List Juggler data as well.

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@player346259

There's no need to resort to personal attacks.

As I said above, a simple "tier 1 / tier 2 / garbage" rating system is overly simplistic, including my own ad-hoc list. Different people have far different interpretations of what "tier 1", "tier 2", "etc" all mean. Using your definition above, most of the ships would be ranked as tier 1 after a full Regional season.

Rather than debate about what we think each other's rating systems should mean, it's far better to frame the discussion in terms of hard data: cut appearance frequency and post-cut performance. Using those metrics, during Regionals 2016, Dash had an average post-cut performance of 80% of a regular list (i.e. roughly 40% per-game win rate). I believe that Dash's effectiveness since Regionals 2016 has gone down due to general power creep, although again, as stated above, it would be good to get newer regionals data analyzed.

Unfortunately a similar analysis does not yet exist for the recent meta. But I am going to try and do something about that. It's a much better use of time than pointless internet arguments and name calling.

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Or maybe 2 or 3 placing out of 60/70 tournaments isn't actually that hot?

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No, not at all, just more than 5 or 6 would be nice.

But as you're wilfully misinterpreting anything people say to you I'm sure you'll twist it into some logical fallacy to troll us all further.

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3 minutes ago, player346259 said:

The last thing I will say is that I am quite disappointed in you. I have read a lot of your articles in the past and they were usually very good quality. But this irrational crusade of yours has obviously taken the best of you, falling as low as calling people mentally retarded.

"wilfully misrepresenting"

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Which isn't what you said I said.

And as he's since admitted he was just trolling... ok?

What a joy it is to play X-Wing.

Have been reading through this thread, only point I agree with amongst all the arguing over trivial matters is that the tournament format is actually the main problem with this game.

This game will be 5 years old soon and the designers are still working to the same format, and putting out several expansions a year, each one having to bring something new to the game AND stand up to some of the previous expansions which are perhaps a bit too powerful. So they come up with new features, conditions cards etc. Eventually it gets to a point where the game being played at tournaments and the game you learn out of the box is just so distorted that new players are put off almost immediately.

I think new tournament formats could help with this. After almost 5 years 100/6 has become so well practiced and analyzed that its now restrictive to the development of the game. Introducing competitive objective modes such as CTF, Territories or even Epic would really change how players approach list design and move the game away from the current staleness that is deathmatch.

It would also open tournaments up to different kinds of players. Not every player is good at/enjoys coming up with the most deadly/exploitative combo of upgrades. Different people think, plan, and strategise differently. The current format does not allow for a terrific amount of inventiveness - sure you see new top meta lists every wave, but at the end of the day they're all designed to do the same thing.

Heck, you could even get really creative with it and have "cinematic" competitive events where there is a storyline to play out similar to the campaigns that come with huge ship expansions (but designed with better balance for tournament play).

My point is, if you want to play 100/6 and nothing else, then fine - I'm sure that format will always be catered for as its at the core of the game. But going almost 5 years with NO progression or innovation in tournament format design is really holding the game back and is only forcing the designers to go in a direction that encourages power creep or breaks the vision of the core game. Let's have some variety, please.

I think 100/6 will actually kill the game eventually. PGLD makes a great point: the game is 5 years old and FFG is stuck in 100/6. That's stagnation.