Big fan of the Mynocks. I have loads of commute time to kill so personally I have the time along with other podcasts. Mynocks is one of my two preferred along with Shuttle Tyridium (hey there err heychsdwick). I also have Nova, TCX, Sit and a couple of others on auto download.

So, as someone who likes to think they have a broad taste in all things Xwing..

For those saying this thread only puts them off the Podcast I'd say a couple of things. Firstly, this probably is not the the best episode to listen to the guys for the first time. Knowing a bit about who they are allows you to appreciate their viewpoints better.

Secondly it's not actually the marathon of whining it to sounds like it could be. It's a bit more balanced thanthat. Ryan, as he has already posted above, especially espouses his continued love for the game.

Thirdly, I love Mynocks banter and occasional silliness. Getting Dee to allow it to be done in an hour.. good luck with that. I suspect Ryan has given up even trying!?

As to the actual content. I found myself nodding along a lot. I still love the game and due to lack of free time to play am a long way from burnout but a lot of the points are relevant. But.

Squad building is now much more impactful than ever. I recently gave a newbie (not even a handful of games) a good squad to fly against a vet flying an 'embryonic' list they wanted to work on. The list wasn't as good as he hoped on the tabletop and he very nearly lost to the power list despite it being rather badly flow. Yes that's very anecdotal but in my experience it's definitely indicative.

Power creep is real. So is Complexity creep. The combos and even individual effects are becoming more detailed and convoluted. Not entirely a bad thing but not only does it interrupt the flow more often figuring stuff out, it does mean the old school stuff is being left far behind.

This leads to the biggest issue. The game isn't worthy of the name Xwing any more. Not for any fun reason.. it's still a great game but you just do not see the thematic ships any more. Xwings are extinct beyond the occasional Biggs. TIE Fighters likewise. The shark of Xwing may aswell have had its teeth pulled as everything's skin is too thick now.

Shiny new stuff shouldn't mean the ships most of us came to the game to fly die off. I accept it's harder to achieve than say but Xwings and Tie Fighters should always be viable. The paradox is, to bring them into the modern age you probably need to add some element of complexity to them!

.

4 hours ago, player346259 said:

I think one of the problem is that the game contains ships from quite a long stretch of time now, beginning before E4 and ending in E7.

In the real world aircrafts from WWI era were completely obsolete in WWII, and rightfully so.

Yet somehow we are still expecting the T65s to be still good alongside the more modern ships.

Well, the Star Wars expanded universe covers about 25,000 years in time with no significant changes in technological capability, so the time between E4 and E7 is really a flash in the pan. OTOH, even within WWII, aircraft used at the beginning of the war were outclassed by the end of the war.

If wars do anything good at all, the generate profits and progress.

6 hours ago, player346259 said:

I think one of the problem is that the game contains ships from quite a long stretch of time now, beginning before E4 and ending in E7.

In the real world aircrafts from WWI era were completely obsolete in WWII, and rightfully so.

Yet somehow we are still expecting the T65s to be still good alongside the more modern ships. And yes, the game kind of needs them to be still viable.

Yes, but the T-70 isn't considered good, either. The Y-wing, which is older than the X-wing is considered worth it. The Ghost is older than the X-wing, but worth it.

The wave 1 ships were dead simple but still not well balanced. Worse, dead simple ships can be much more easily in terms of pure math. TIE fighters were significantly better than anything else. The only reason X-wings saw play was a lack of other options.

7 minutes ago, Panzeh said:

The wave 1 ships were dead simple but still not well balanced. Worse, dead simple ships can be much more easily in terms of pure math. TIE fighters were significantly better than anything else. The only reason X-wings saw play was a lack of other options.

C'mon, the worst ship in the core set is the senator's shuttle. X-Wings rock!

On 2/10/2017 at 8:21 AM, Stay On The Leader said:

And bans have had significant positive effects in Magic pretty much every single time they've been used.

My concern is that the ban train never ends. Once one set of cards are banned, the next most powerful sets will crop up and dominate. Repeat until we're back to the Starter Box.
Also, there will come a time when people will realize that their purchases have a limited window of playability in tournaments. This is great for FFG where everyone who plays competitivley will have to buy the new waves to stay in. Or just quit playing tournaments.

9 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

C'mon, the worst ship in the core set is the senator's shuttle. X-Wings rock!

Well when you put it that way..

Touche, good sir!

9 hours ago, LordBlades said:

I can't really comment about how stuff was like before I started playing, but since I joined the game in Wave 6 list building has been a pretty big part of the game. I started with Scum and tried different things, and every time I chose not to bring Brobots it felt like I had to first dig myself out of a hole of my own making in order to win.

That being said, what I feel has increased a lot during my time playing is the gap between competitive and casual squads. A year back I could take Brobots against a casual squad and, even if I would still win probably 80% of the time, it still felt like a game, with both sides doing meaningful stuff. Now, if I bring Dengaroo or Parattani against a casual squad, it's going to get absolutely murdered by mechanics it has absolutely no response to.

Brobots in wave 6 and dengaroo now aren't really valid comparisons. Brobots have always been GOOD but nowhere near broken. Taking dengar against a casual squad is more like taking whisper back before the declaim chang, or even palp aces before imp veterans pretty much dropped soon tie from the meta.

41 minutes ago, Panzeh said:

The wave 1 ships were dead simple but still not well balanced. Worse, dead simple ships can be much more easily in terms of pure math. TIE fighters were significantly better than anything else. The only reason X-wings saw play was a lack of other options.

I'll disagree with this. They were fine until Arc Dodgers really took over. It was either Fat Han or PTL Soontir that really screwed the X-wing. I don't think it was that they were bad and there were no other options. I think the shape of the game changed significantly. Jousting was a thing for a while and that's not a bad thing.

Well, I think the problem here now is design space. Jousting was a thing Wave 1. Okay, well, you didn't have much else to do. Munitions must fire from the forward arc. The Y had a turret to fire out of arc, but a turret designed primarily for offense didn't occur until Wave 3 (and because I don't see it much, I assume Blaster Turret is an early upgrade which is priced too conservatively for what it does). So naturally all you could do was move toward the enemy directly and roll dice at them, and try and not be in their angle but otherwise roll more dice.

So... should that have persisted for nearly 5 years of gameplay? This is a legit question. X-Wing will be 5 years in September, should it have just stayed that way? I'd argue it shouldn't, and people who think it should probably wouldn't actually want it either. You eventually run out of combinations of red/green/yellow/blue numbers and squiggly arrows on the dial. Jousting can't just stay move and roll dice, you'd burn out the game really fast that way. You have to make new tactics, and explore new options in old tactics, like the game does now. And even if you hadn't realized it yet, eventually people would crunch numbers and cotton on to the fact that every other ship besides the TIE in the Wave 1 does appear to have been imprecisely costed in ways which have, for the Y and the Advanced needed to be compensated for with later releases. TIE Fighters and Xs have been re-released too, but those didn't seem specifically like fix releases, just adding to the pool of pilots and options. This sort of thing is why I think a lot of newer players tend to feel like a lot of the old guard doing most of the "complaining" are just using the rose-tinted goggles. To us, the past is a singular snapshot - we can look at all prior content at once and kind of see how it shook out and be like "yeah, of course you jousted in Wave 1 there wasn't anything else to do for like 6 months", but to us 6 Months is a tiny blip in a game nearly 5 years and 10 waves plus some stuff in. People who started early though, your experience with X-Wing is more like a movie (with editing). You start early and play through until now so you see the whole change and move through the lens of memory. Of course memory is unreliable, but enjoyment is also subjective. I don't say either viewpoint is correct - both are the shadows in the cave of X-Wing. They are both the thing, or at least our human experience of it. I'm just saying maybe both sides need to be aware of how we're looking at it from different angles.

I've been playing since wave 1 and I think X-Wing is a fun game.

1 hour ago, Chumbalaya said:

I've been playing since wave 1 and I think X-Wing is a fun game.

I think we're a minority here, but yeah

Unfortunately interrupted by kids half way through so I "listened" but didn't "hear" all the conversations....but I still have some comments.

Sick and tired of hearing X-Wing 2.0...Do you want something different?? Go play some EPIC (which is awesome by the way).

I use to love teaching new players of the game but this is increasingly hard to do. Basically, there is a split of personalities and some of it is unavoidable due to the requirement to sell product. I believe the simplicity but varying visual/geometry skill is what made X-Wing fun to play "Back in the Day" Simple to play but hard to become the expert. While the meta at competition is much more varied, I think the underlying greatness of the game of actually flying is getting lost compared to the combo building. Great pilots will always be great but when a new punk kid (like I was once) can combo card your TIE Swarm to death, that sucks. BTW, the TIE Swarm should be OP. It is the Imperials and numerical superiority is the BEST!!!!

The Scum love is frustrating. I am glad they are caught up but at what price? Stress, what USE to be important is now relegated to nothingness. (I use to play Tycho in a 3 A-wing List so call me what you want). There is less of a risk/reward (except for rebels and Imperials).
Now you have large based ships flying faster and BETTER with EPTs than Rebels and Imperials. This is a HUGE Mechanics creep that erodes the framework of the game. The mechanics creep IS pushing out ships. Not a weapon type or combo but the actual mechanics.

I have hosted and participated in kid tournaments. I use to take great pride that my 5 year old could play the basic game. But with condition cards and all the combo cards, does he have a place to grow into the game? If I want combo power I will pick up an LCG or CCG. Now throw in conditions (better get those kindergarten reading skills complete). The point is not that this is not a game for kids, but that the new user starts at the same level even with prior experience. They will learn quicker but when you have a higher barrier to starting the game, there will be less growth. Maybe I have the market space all wrong, have not really studied it, but I have spent time with new players and it is changing.

So chalk me up to the old guy who wished for the past days, actual flying instead of combo-ing. Having said that I do understand the need to keep the game progressing but there are so many ships out there to build and add before working on skills and combo's. I do feel there is not a finite life on the game when 2 years ago I thought this thing was going to be around for a long time. Now people are talking about 2.0 and it just seems so premature but inevitable.

As for just having fun, what is this crap casual vs competitive. Make other formats competitive such as MarioKart, Hunger Games, Furball, Combine Hunger Games and Furball like I did for a tournament, and many other ideas like objectives.

And guys.....go play some EPIC.

12 hours ago, player346259 said:

I think one of the problem is that the game contains ships from quite a long stretch of time now, beginning before E4 and ending in E7.

In the real world aircrafts from WWI era were completely obsolete in WWII, and rightfully so.

Yet somehow we are still expecting the T65s to be still good alongside the more modern ships. And yes, the game kind of needs them to be still viable.

Umm, what the hell kind of argument is this? Of course we're still expecting the T-65s we spent money on to be good because:

(1) It's Star Wars and not real life: in Star Wars, technological stagnation has occurred after technological development hit a plateau back in the Old Republic (over 1,000 years before ANH). Read or play anything set in the Old Republic (e.g. just YouTube the cinematic scenes from the new Old Republic PC Game) and you'll quickly see that armor, blasters, light sabers, and space ships are literally almost entirely unchanged. Rey's running around with a 60 year old lighsaber, the Millennium Falcon was "an old hunk of junk" by the time ANH begins, but still manages to hold its own and kill a Death Star or two. Design in the Star Wars universe is basically determined by two factors: (1) how much are you willing to pay for it? and (2) what's your aesthetic preferences? The Empire has built TIE/Defenders, but it's not like this made the TIE/ln obsolete. Of course not, they stuck with the TIE because it was cheap and when you have to garrison an entire galaxy every single penny saved counts. Sure, the Rebellion would probably love to put every pilot in the cockpit of an X-Wing, but they don't have the funds and they might as well get use out of every ship they do have available (so they keep Z95s and Y-Wings in the air). These cheaper ships may not win a one-on-one dogfight against the most expensive (not even necessarily the newest) fighter available, but they're useful enough to keep them flying. It's not like the Lambourghini Countach so obsoleted cars at doing car stuff when it debuted in 1970 that everyone said "nuts to the old stuff!' and Nissan and Honda and Ford went out of business.

(2) It's a game and not real life: in a game balanced on points, power levels should be relatively equal based on their points-cost if it's a balanced game. Yes, the fighting style and military technology of ancient Greek hoplites were made obsolete over time. But I'm playing a competitive game that allows me to pit Spartan hoplites against modern day US Marines, Spartans and Marines should be costed as such that I can have a greater number of Spartans such that the actual battle between the two forces should be fairly even, even if an individual Marine would never lose to a single Spartan soldier. Real life is never balanced or fair. But a competitive game has no reason not to aim for that balance.


Plus, your chronological argument makes no sense, since some of the best ships at the end of the Wave 9 meta (per tournament results) were the VCX, the TAP, and the Mandalorian Interceptor, all stemming from the earliest source material for the game outside of the ARC.

I finally listened to most of the podcast today. I found myself in agreement with most of their criticism of the state of the game.

For myself, the combo-card play is not my cup of tea. Rather what attracted me to the game was 1) Star Wars, and 2) the flying.

When the player through clever card combos no longer has to make tough choices (which action should I do? Ah screw it, with these cards I can have focus token stack, evade and a target lock!)

When they introduce ships that I never saw in a movie with characters I don't care about and they can beat the best pilots in the galaxy because FFG wants you to buy their expansion, it doesn't resonate well with me.

.

4 hours ago, Chumbalaya said:

I've been playing since wave 1 and I think X-Wing is a fun game.

I do think it's a fun game, but only after giving up on tournaments and playing tournament lists. Unfortunately, I am having some friends that are starting to question whether they want to keep playing or not. There are a number of people that are wondering if it is a fun game. I'm trying to get them out of tournaments where most people have a good time.

I'd like to see FFG begin using seasonal ban lists, or a new scenario/objective for the standard tournament match, or both.

.

29 minutes ago, player346259 said:

Nicely sounding argument, but quite incorrect.

The technological development is very explicit in the movies as well as the game, between E6 and E7:

TIE/ln -> TIE/fo

T65 -> T70

Also, just chill man..

T-70??? That is so yesterday. You should check out the T-85.

15 minutes ago, player346259 said:

OK, so why don't you just stay away from the tournaments then and keep having fun in casual?

There is a wise saying which goes "if you have nothing good to say, rather don't say anything".

I think you and the other negative commenters on this forum should take this to the heart.

Why are you spoiling fun for the others with your non-stop negative comments?

Is this some cultural thing when people have the need to talk about his feeling and use the forum as his therapy?

I can see now that joining this discussion was a mistake right from the beginning, but I couldn't resist the urge to counterpoint some of the very childish and unfair complaints about this game and FFG..

Reverting back to stealth mode in 3..2..1..

As long as people are having fun going pew pew spaceships it really doesn't matter how. People are free to express their concerns or displeasure with the game, maybe a little venting helps them feel better or helps identify other like-minded folks. If it gets you down you can just go read another thread

1 hour ago, player346259 said:

OK, so why don't you just stay away from the tournaments then and keep having fun in casual?

There is a wise saying which goes "if you have nothing good to say, rather don't say anything".

I think you and the other negative commenters on this forum should take this to the heart.

Why are you spoiling fun for the others with your non-stop negative comments?

Is this some cultural thing when people have the need to talk about his feeling and use the forum as his therapy?

I can see now that joining this discussion was a mistake right from the beginning, but I couldn't resist the urge to counterpoint some of the very childish and unfair complaints about this game and FFG..

Reverting back to stealth mode in 3..2..1..

I find this very funny as most people consider me pretty upbeat about playing the game. Oh, I don't go to tournaments and only play causal. Don't worry. I have fun. What I'm doing is countering the comments were people are dismissing things that are wrong with the game. I've been playing since Wave 1 and I've heard more people talk about issues with Xwing than ever before. I mention them because I see so many people just dismiss those that have concerns and blow them off. They are legitimate concerns about the game that they spent much money and time on and they want it to be better. Just because people have criticism isn't that they just like to tear things down or take out their frustrations on an internet forum. There really has been a shift lately and there are a number of unhappy people in the game. You can't just dismiss this with a wave of "they are just negative people".

Also, it's insulting to say that their concerns are childish.

1 hour ago, player346259 said:

OK, so why don't you just stay away from the tournaments then and keep having fun in casual?

There is a wise saying which goes "if you have nothing good to say, rather don't say anything".

I think you and the other negative commenters on this forum should take this to the heart.

Why are you spoiling fun for the others with your non-stop negative comments?

Is this some cultural thing when people have the need to talk about his feeling and use the forum as his therapy?

I can see now that joining this discussion was a mistake right from the beginning, but I couldn't resist the urge to counterpoint some of the very childish and unfair complaints about this game and FFG..

Reverting back to stealth mode in 3..2..1..

The problem here is that some of the tournament combo lists start to infect casual games.

It's difficult for me to fly what I like (anything from the first 3 waves) when there is a 7 dice range 1 Emo Ren out there waiting to take out my X-wings.

I don't care if I win or lose, but I would at least like to have a chance.

Just to let you know this is not a wish for the old days post since I started playing last summer.

2 hours ago, player346259 said:

OK, so why don't you just stay away from the tournaments then and keep having fun in casual?

You typed a lot of unnecessary static, but this one was actually a good question.

The problem is that the standard 100-point tournament match format is the same format most new players expect when they show up at an X-Wing game night for the first time. All of the problems of high level competitive gameplay (the proliferation of netlist clones, overuse of turrets, excessive dice control, obvious power creep, etc.) are present in casual store play.

For someone just trying to get their head around the core set and a couple of B-Wings, it's entirely possible to encounter Emperor Palpatine your first time out and realize that your idea of what a good squad might be is completely defeated by abilities and flight patterns that aren't even hinted at in the first few waves of the game. That's a problem from a new player's perspective, and for tournament organizers trying to bring in and retain players.

The very game format FFG hopes I'm going to sell new players on has become an exercise in frustration too often. Something really needs to change or tournament play is going to lose its appeal to all but an elite few who don't think anything's missing from the game. ("Look, Biggs is there. There's an X-Wing, so what are you complaining about?")