53 minutes ago, JJFDVORAK said:

The problem lies in each new ship being the best thing ever and invalidating older, more iconic ships.

This. So much this.

And not "best thing ever" in the players minds because it is new, but because it is mechanically the best thing ever.

7 hours ago, Stay On The Leader said:

Maybe, but to share an anecdote from last week.

We were playing in the store last Friday evening, I was running my TIE/sfs against Rey/Poe and over my shoulder I realised a guy had been watching us for a few minutes, and his opening line was "this looks way more complicated than I thought, I came down to give it a try but it looks very difficult".

We swept all the tournament stuff away, gave him 60pts of TIE fighters and TIE/fo against 60pts of X-Wings and he had a great evening, and hopefully will be back tonight. But all the stuff that we're using definitely adds layer on layer of stuff that, as established players, we don't really even see is there any more.

Here's an anecdote of mine from the other week.

I played at a local Epic tournament. One game (Imperial v. Imperial) I played in particular stood out - the two Epic ships ended up locked in battle on one side of the board. On the other side of the board our opposing fighters faced off. There were Defenders with X-7, a mini Howlrunner swarm, a mini Interceptor swarm, a min Tempest swarm with Accuracy Corrector, and a couple of bombers.

The battle on the fighter side of the board was the most fun I've had in X-Wing for a long, long, time. We were jockeying for position, dodging arcs, swinging around asteroids for cover. It was a genuine OMG we're having a Star Wars space battle moment.

We were having our PLAYER skill of manoeuvring and strategically second guessing our opponents movements tested, not our ability to list build against broken meta combos.

2 hours ago, maxam said:

We were having our PLAYER skill of manoeuvring and strategically second guessing our opponents movements tested, not our ability to list build against broken meta combos.

You can have both. You just have to be the one to stop using the meta combos first. I brought four TIE Bombers to Regionals. Everyone laughed. I finished a hair outside top 8, with a slew of confused opponents behind me. Last year I won Regionals using a Hwk with an Ion Cannon and Crackshot, with equally confused opponents.

Go do both.

While some of what you written is true, i don't agree that power level should be based on skill in canon, this way we would never move forward and keep having the same pilots in lists forever. In this case, gameplay>fluff.

PS: Protectorate is pretty iconic actually, as opposed to toilet seat.

It's now several 100s of upgrade cards, of which many are duds for competitive play, some pretty bad even in epic, casual or thematic play.

A dozen daisy chain builds, which will just stomp any unsuspecting new player, many bordering on NPE as they take away fundamental functions of the opponent's move/action/ship.

On top of it a 23page FaQ/Errata, bomb rules spread over 7+ different places. And most aggrevating: unclear ruling/bad formulations (stress bot, Hotshot copilot), and especially back and forth decisions by FFG (e.g. Gonk, damage deck etc).

You cannot really say that this is any longer an easy to teach game. Anyone who is willing to do more than some fun games at home has nowadays a really STEEP hill to climb.

As long as FFG won´t realase Faction Books, without you are not able to play, and scraps them regulary to realease new ones, no FFG is not becoming the new GW.