1 hour ago, haslo said:

Descent is a game in a box, and there's roughly 100 cards in there. X-Wing is a living game, and many of us own hundreds of ships and thousands of cards for it.

Box + expansions

Edit:

The conversion kit contained just over 100 characters to include the base set and expansions. Each expansion basically being larger than an entire X-Wing "wave" with around 6 ships heros and 5 monster types that needed to be converted to the new rules.

An X-Wing conversion kit would have to include a couple hundred cards, a set of dice (if changed) and some stickers for any dial changes. The amounts contained would have to be reasonable, as the progress of the game can't be held hostage to the fact that someone, somewhere, bought 500+ ships and that person demands a replacement for every single one of those in one kit.

That person may have to buy a couple kits to cover their huge collection that will never be played in one sitting.

Also, as far as the "living game" example, you may want to look up the current Descent lineup. There are more box expansions, campaign sets, and expansion packs than X-Wing.

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/descent-journeys-in-the-dark-second-edition/

Be sure to open up Expansions, Hero and Monster Collections, and so forth.

There are a lot of designs that could go into a 2.0.

Malifaux 2E did a ton of rebalancing work, reworked some essential mechanics, simplified many figs and interactions, and retooled the scenarios significantly while keeping to a skirmish level game.

WM/H MkII tightened up some basic mechanics, improved the warjacks/beasts and streamlined figures significantly to broaden ones ability to field more figures which took things in a bit of a different direction with releases of GIANT figures.

XWM 2.0 could manifest in a bunchbof different ways.

Things I would change:

Add medium base ships: U-wing, K-wing, Tie Punisher, G1A star fighter

Secondary weapons: No range 1 bonus, however, targets from turrets will receive the range 3 bonus

Small cost adjustments to standard power cards: TLT, FCS, and so on

55 minutes ago, haslo said:

Descent is a game in a box, and there's roughly 100 cards in there. X-Wing is a living game, and many of us own hundreds of ships and thousands of cards for it.

There's no reason we need 2.0 versions of every card currently in X-Wing. Generally, the whole point of a version change is to jettison all the built up junk. You clean up all the patchwork fixes and build them in as if they had been designed that way to begin with. No reason for Adaptive Allerions if ships have special abilities on their card for example. We don't need Guidance Chips if Ordinance has its own, useful mechanics. We don't need Blaster Turret if.... okay, we don't need Blaster Turret.

8 minutes ago, LunarSol said:

There's no reason we need 2.0 versions of every card currently in X-Wing. Generally, the whole point of a version change is to jettison all the built up junk. You clean up all the patchwork fixes and build them in as if they had been designed that way to begin with. No reason for Adaptive Allerions if ships have special abilities on their card for example. We don't need Guidance Chips if Ordinance has its own, useful mechanics. We don't need Blaster Turret if.... okay, we don't need Blaster Turret.

We don't need any of these fixes if you can tolerate them being in a FAQ or on an upgrade card.

We don't need a 2.0.

I am a casual player and Ouray group just print our lists and we play, often misinterpreting or just plain forgettingthe rules. I don't think the game needs a complete overhaul though a new rule book with the FAQ rulings integrated would be nice.

That said if they did decide to do a 2.0 I think they would move away from 100 point list for tournament play. They would probably move to 1000 points so upgrades costs could be fine tuned. Veteran Instincts for example costs 1 point currently. That feels a little inexpensive for its in game value but 2 points would make it over costed. On a 1000 point scale it could cost 15 points and be appropriately costed.

12 minutes ago, Wretch said:

I am a casual player and Ouray group just print our lists and we play, often misinterpreting or just plain forgettingthe rules. I don't think the game needs a complete overhaul though a new rule book with the FAQ rulings integrated would be nice.

That said if they did decide to do a 2.0 I think they would move away from 100 point list for tournament play. They would probably move to 1000 points so upgrades costs could be fine tuned. Veteran Instincts for example costs 1 point currently. That feels a little inexpensive for its in game value but 2 points would make it over costed. On a 1000 point scale it could cost 15 points and be appropriately costed.

That's such a minute "problem" with the game that it doesn't warrant a 2.0 revision.

This game has survived the horrors that were waves 4 & 5 and we're going to do 2.0 because Adrenaline Rush is in reality a 0.60 cost card?! Because VI should be 2 points?

This is ridiculous.

1 hour ago, doji said:

. New editions should be used in an attempt to revive a game a dead or dying game.

Most of people problems on the form could easily fixed by tossing out the old rulebook releasing a new one and some updated templets.

GURPS was not dying nor is dead from going from 3e to 4e. What happened was that there was a significant change in how the game was going to approach character building. They are readily interchangeable to this date, albeit with occasional light modifications.

And when you toss out the old rulebook and issue a new one, how are you going to let players know which is which? Revised? Advanced? Enhanced? 2nd Edition? 2.0? Updated? Or just put new art on the cover and pretend nothing happened?

We had a 'revised' edition already, the second core set. It came with what amounted to the errata up to that point. I see perhaps similar releases (probably not any more cores unless there's another trilogy after the sequels) every few years to clarify the rules updates and changes for the casual gamers while providing new ship models and materials. Maybe like a Most Wanted type of release, or a core set but it contains materials for ships

other than the ones included.

'Revised First Edition' seems to be the way FFG is leaning.

Please not yet. I know it is inevitable, but I don't think it is really going to fix any problems. Then second edition will still have a meta and people will still find flaws in it.

Second editins ions work better when you buy the models and the stats for the models separate.

9 minutes ago, GrimmyV said:

We had a 'revised' edition already, the second core set. It came with what amounted to the errata up to that point. I see perhaps similar releases (probably not any more cores unless there's another trilogy after the sequels) every few years to clarify the rules updates and changes for the casual gamers while providing new ship models and materials. Maybe like a Most Wanted type of release, or a core set but it contains materials for ships

other than the ones included.

'Revised First Edition' seems to be the way FFG is leaning.

I don't care if the call it Pink Kittens in Space. Just get the real rules on the cards again. And maybe codify a few old and new tweaks to the game.

As someone pointed out in another thread, this game is going to start looking pretty stupid to new players that are told that many of the cards are wrong, but here is a 25 page errata to peruse. It makes the design look bad, even if it is not.

41 minutes ago, Turbo Toker said:

That's such a minute "problem" with the game that it doesn't warrant a 2.0 revision.

Why does it have to be one big problem? Why can't it be lots of little problems, like the fact that I can't take B-Wings to a tournament as anything other than a joke list? Or that at least a dozen upgrade cards are over or undercosted? Or that the wording on over 20 cards have changed from their initial printing, some of them radically? Or that we have two damage decks with radically different balances, with the only reason we have two is that people complained until FFG changed its mind? Or that 90% of the pilot cards are wasted cardstock from a tournament player's perspective, and at least 50% of them are wasted cardstock from a casual player's perspective? Or that the fixes for various ships are scattered across multiple ships and factions that a player might not want to buy just to fly TIE Advanceds or Y-Wings? Or that fluffwise Lambdas should have rear arcs and A-Wings should have 180 arcs?

Things I'd like to do to the game system, and some of these are quite radical, and none of them have any chance of being done at all :

1) Open-source the point costing algorithm for the basic ships, have it known from the beginning so it can be scrutinized. If there is such a thing as an actual algorithm, I'm not sure I believe it any more.

2) Go to a 200 base value instead of 100.

3) Simplify Pilot Skill to a 5-point system instead of 10, probably Green-Regular-Veteran-Elite-Ace, or just 1-5 to represent where they fit on that scale. Really, is Soontir that much better than Luke?

4) Make Ship cards just the basic frame, and Pilot cards separate upgrades that must be purchased - and if they are not, the pilot is Green. Named pilots grant special abilities, and are also restricted to certain ships - Han Solo in a Z-95 and the Falcon, for example, and Luke in X-Wing and E-Wing. Certain ships would have Pilot Skill deficits to represent their poor handling - Bombers and Y-Wings - others would give a bonus - Interceptors and A-Wings come to mind.

5) Add a simple objective system based off of the missions in the core book - scanning satellites, escorting a shuttle, straight deathmatch. All three require different enough builds that you can't be sure WHAT would be best, which would lead to variance in listbuilding. Adopting Warmachine's tournament system and requiring players to bring several lists would ease some of the woes that hyperfocused ships would suffer, while still allowing other ships to show their talents. Possibly adopt Malifaux's system where one player can play to one objective and the other can play to another.

6) @LunarSol 's idea of Focus being a resource that needs to be managed over the game is quite brilliant; each ship starts with a certain amount of focus and, say, green maneuvers with no action taken give another token to the stack. It means that early on you have to THINK about when you spend your focus - is that attack all that important, or should you save it for the late game when you might need it to survive? It makes early game movement also important - engage quickly to prevent them from stacking tokens, or try and kite them to stack more tokens for your engagement? More decisions = better gameplay.

7) Integrating a campaign system and other alternate ways of playing into the prize support of the game itself , rather than saying, "There's 100/6 and... uh... Epic, sometimes, when we feel like it."

But the same people who whined loudest about "I don' wanna have to buy a new Core Set just for a damage deck!" and then quietly bought the TFA Core anyway because Poe Dameron was good and the new damage deck was beneficial will hold X-Wing in its current, flawed state. (To be fair, FFG could have tried packaging the damage deck separately, maybe even as a giveaway in limited numbers.)

Or that the game was trapped in an escalation war with Primary Weapon Turrets for over a year, and the game is littered with legacies of that which you are required to buy and use if you don't want to be eaten alive by the few suckers still flying PWTs, and new clunky upgrade cards like Concord Dawn Defender meant to make arcs more important which adds more complication to the game?

There's a lot of little things wrong with the game. There's plenty right with it too, but if more things are wrong than are right then things need to be changed.

Wow!

It is my opinion that X-wing probably doesn’t need a second version or edition.

Though it absolutely needs to be revised and updated. This is what FFG own to his customers. With Out A Doubt!

FFG knows what it need to update and bring balance to the game. When only a few lists builds dominate, there is a problem.

The fix is very simple. Every model has an updated packet, (which doesn’t include a model), so you only purchase the updates that you use. For example, The Tie Fighter as a standalone update packet. If you need four buy what you need. So, if you’re not going to use a Tie Bomber, don’t buy the updates! No one has to buy more models, and they purchase only the updates that they need. The same goes for the coreset, a standalone box, with updated rules, and only whose counters that need to be updates and maybe add a few things extra like a range guild for length R1, and R2.

16 minutes ago, devotedknight said:

Wow!

It is my opinion that X-wing probably doesn’t need a second version or edition.

Though it absolutely needs to be revised and updated. This is what FFG own to his customers. With Out A Doubt!

FFG knows what it need to update and bring balance to the game. When only a few lists builds dominate, there is a problem.

The fix is very simple. Every model has an updated packet, (which doesn’t include a model), so you only purchase the updates that you use. For example, The Tie Fighter as a standalone update packet. If you need four buy what you need. So, if you’re not going to use a Tie Bomber, don’t buy the updates! No one has to buy more models, and they purchase only the updates that they need. The same goes for the coreset, a standalone box, with updated rules, and only whose counters that need to be updates and maybe add a few things extra like a range guild for length R1, and R2.

I already have paid for 8 TIE Fighters. I'm not buying 8 TIE Fighter update packs. No.

I think, again, people are ignoring the business side of the matter. There was over a year between Descent and Descent 2nd. I think there was also supposed to be nearly a year between when AGOT ended and AGOT 2 was released.

So, about a year of no new X-wing products. And a meta that will have no new cards or ships to shake things up. For their biggest game.

So yes, X-wing is too big to kill off for a second edition. Would WOTC seriously stop printing Magic cards for a year to "fix the game"?

6 hours ago, kris40k said:

That person may have to buy a couple kits to cover their huge collection that will never be played in one sitting.

That's all I'm saying.

Your argument was "it's not going to cost $1000s", to which my reply was "but it will cost $100s", to which you now reply "yes, that's correct". So I rest my case in this side argument

I'm not telling you how to play your game, so please don't tell me I shouldn't be able to field every one of my ships as a 100 point swarm with their cheapest pilots

5 hours ago, LunarSol said:

There's no reason we need 2.0 versions of every card currently in X-Wing. Generally, the whole point of a version change is to jettison all the built up junk. You clean up all the patchwork fixes and build them in as if they had been designed that way to begin with.

Either what you're talking about is incremental enough that it can be done without a reboot (and thus naming it 2.0 is silly), or it's fundamental enough that they won't do it for all the ships that are currently out and start anew and we have to buy everything from scratch.

There is no middle ground, for two reasons: First, cost for customers, second, balancing and development. X-Wing, unlike Descent 2nd, is a competitive game with a tournament scene. Descent 2nd is better than Descent 1st in terms of wildly unbalanced combos, but there still are quite a few in there - but that doesn't matter because it's more about the experience, particularly now that the bad guy can be replaced with an app and everybody is on the same team. That won't work for X-Wing.

4 hours ago, iamfanboy said:

Why does it have to be one big problem? Why can't it be lots of little problems, like the fact that I can't take B-Wings to a tournament as anything other than a joke list? Or that at least a dozen upgrade cards are over or undercosted? Or that the wording on over 20 cards have changed from their initial printing, some of them radically? Or that we have two damage decks with radically different balances, with the only reason we have two is that people complained until FFG changed its mind? Or that 90% of the pilot cards are wasted cardstock from a tournament player's perspective, and at least 50% of them are wasted cardstock from a casual player's perspective? Or that the fixes for various ships are scattered across multiple ships and factions that a player might not want to buy just to fly TIE Advanceds or Y-Wings? Or that fluffwise Lambdas should have rear arcs and A-Wings should have 180 arcs?

All these things, if changed, will just lead to new pilots, upgrades, ships and combos that are relatively undercosted or overcosted, and new minutiae that people will complain about. A sufficiently complex system cannot be perfectly balanced, particularly not if new things that interact with old parts of the system come out all the time. FFG does a great job at micro balancing the game through "patches" in the form of new upgrade cards; as soon as they get to a new ship it's probably successful after they've looked at it.

They don't have the time to look at all the ships simultaneously though, and playtest them all at the same time. If they did, I'm sure balance would be much worse than it is now. I think that would be man-decades, not must man-years, and I'm sure that I'm still underestimating the effort it would take. The only alternative that doesn't take that long is the "start from scratch" approach.

Personally, I'm fine with a relatively wide selection of competitively reasonable ships, and some outliers that are bad enough to be not competitive, as long as there are no outliers that are much too strong for their cost. Because the latter are the ones that warp the meta, the ones that dominate tournaments and make the game no fun to play.

It's a pity that flying Guri is something that only works for casual games, but I'd much rather have that than having to fly Guri at a tournament in order to stand a chance against all the opponent's Guris in the first place.

15 minutes ago, haslo said:

Your argument was "it's not going to cost $1000s", to which my reply was "but it will cost $100s", to which you now reply "yes, that's correct". So I rest my case in this side argument

But then again, if you keep playing and still wish to be competitive against most other players, you will need to spend that money anyway because power creep. And because power creep, your old material is still for a significant part redundant. So whether or not a 2nd edition is going to be more expensive remains to be seen.

2e has already been implemented, just not in one go. For example, when Rebel Veterans was published, the old A-Wing received practically a new edition. To play the A-Wing competitively, you needed to spend the money on Rebel Veterans.

Generally, spending money 'just to keep up' is already a thing in X-Wing. I don't see a principal difference if that is done under the flag of a new edition.

18 hours ago, Vargas79 said:

X-wing 2nd edition would be the easiest way to fix the JM5K

Or they could simply make an errata of it... (like increasing the cost in 2-3 points)

I hope there is no X-Wing 2.0 in the next 4 years, but I'm WAITING for a campaign box. For yesterday.

If they just want to change some rules, however, that would be OK.

17 minutes ago, Odanan said:

I hope there is no X-Wing 2.0 in the next 4 years, but I'm WAITING for a campaign box. For yesterday.

If they just want to change some rules, however, that would be OK.

The second core set already changed some rules. So I think a new edition is unlikely: expansions can be changed with errata and new upgrades, rules can be changed with errata and new core sets. The only downside is that nothing can be made truly obsolete. So apart from the occasional 'ballast' from old products (the old damage deck, bloat of upgrades) this works quite well.

I've been waiting for a campaign box since 2012. After wave 1, the first thing I expected was a scenario box about the battle of Yavin.

Some of the ideas being thrown around here make it seem as though people would prefer to be playing a different game entirely.

X-Wing version 1.0 or 2.0, be it paid purchase or FAQ based or whatever, the game's fundamentals are not going to drastically change. And nor should they.

16 minutes ago, FTS Gecko said:

Some of the ideas being thrown around here make it seem as though people would prefer to be playing a different game entirely.

X-Wing version 1.0 or 2.0, be it paid purchase or FAQ based or whatever, the game's fundamentals are not going to drastically change. And nor should they.

But the game has changed to something else. If you play checkers and start adding pieces that behave like chess pieces then you end up playing a different game. That has happened to X-Wing. We might go on about what constitutes a 'radical' change and what are the 'fundamentals', but I suspect that these definitions are very fluid and have also changed in the past.

Maybe they'll just phase out the old core set and wave 1 ships, replacing the models and pilots with new versions of course. Should we call it 'edition creep'?

I could see it happening with a Descent-style conversion kit available.

If it does, I think a few things are needed:

A range of attack dice, specifically high-accuracy/low damage, normal, and low-accuracy/high damage, for the three main sorts of attacks that x-wing tries to represent, to wit, missiles, blasters, torpedoes, broadly speaking.

Turrets become mobile arcs, both PWTs and upgrades. The conversion kit would include new base plates for all the PWT and turret-upgrade ships.

A whole bunch of ships get updated dials and action bars.

Medium bases, which are two small bases in size and have nubs on all four sides, so they can be used 'long' or 'wide' depending on the ship.

A radical rules overhaul for large ship actions, possibly even a different set of templates or rules for large ship movement.

Defence dice get simplified or removed entirely, and the game rebalanced accordingly (this one's a pipe dream though).

I would expect that the majority of the game would remain playable with the conversion kit, and then as new sets/reboots of old sets came out, the old stuff would become obsolete.

--

All of which would be cool, but given that x-wing is working fine, and currently seems to be growing well, with the current model, I doubt it'll happen. If it was going to, the obvious time would have been when TFA came out.

The game needs an edition that separates accuracy and damage for all weapons

It needs an edition which makes bombs viable for more than one faction

It needs an edition that makes taking generics worthwhile, while keeping aces cost-efficient / in line (i.e. better point balance and Squadron upgrades)

The game needs an edition where ordnance works across the board, not just for one ship (JM5K, may you rot in gamedev hell)

It needs an edition where turrets aren't spiritless dice mechanics just flying around trying to dodge arcs

It needs an edition where every ship has a defined role and mechanics that support that

It needs an edition where stress is a binary state, and not just a pile of tokens with varying effects (i.e. referenced by other upgrade cards/pilots)

It needs an edition where you actually see X-Wings vs TIE Fighters on the tables because that is what the game used to be

My 2 blaster bolts