5 hours ago, Makaze said:

While I love stats as much as the next guy can we all just take a moment to recognize (or in some cases maybe realize) that the overwhelming vast majority of the X-Wing tournament player base is not composed of anything resembling rational actors? I sometimes feel like behavioral economics needs to ****slap us all...

List data tells us what people are bringing, not why. You're definitely not wrong there, that's a hugely important thing to keep in mind.

For example:

Wedge is the #1 pilot. Does that mean Wedge is OP and needs a nerf?

Well... maybe (TM)? We can't be sure there aren't just a lot of people flying him because they like him. Or maybe he's just a strong meta counter, or synergizes well with other stuff that's too cheap (eg Leia). If Wedge got nerfed, but also Leia got nerfed, and also a bunch of other buffs/nerfs changed the meta to consist less of stuff Wedge is good against, maybe the combination would be overkill and he'd be bad now. The other direction of that is what a lot of people ITT are arguing was done to Han, right now.

Another archetypical example is the Academy Pilot. What on Earth is that pilot doing so high in the rankings? Is Academy Pilot OP?

Super no, Academy Pilots are actively bad and could probably use a significant buff. However... Howlrunner. In Hyperspace, an exceeding majority of those Academies are flown alongside Howl, like 90%+. The ranking for that pilot is actually just a masked proxy for the ranking of basically the only archetype it's used in.

7 hours ago, Makaze said:

While I love stats as much as the next guy can we all just take a moment to recognize (or in some cases maybe realize) that the overwhelming vast majority of the X-Wing tournament player base is not composed of anything resembling rational actors? I sometimes feel like behavioral economics needs to ****slap us all...

It always astounds me when people presume almost anything is efficient, particularly a game where no real $ is involved.

I for one still believe in Elusive Chopper Porkins. Meta Wing cant take the sky from me.

7 hours ago, Makaze said:

While I love stats as much as the next guy can we all just take a moment to recognize (or in some cases maybe realize) that the overwhelming vast majority of the X-Wing tournament player base is not composed of anything resembling rational actors? I sometimes feel like behavioral economics needs to ****slap us all...

I take pride in flying my own thing and not netlisting. It might ultimately hurt me, but I have loads of fun with it and people get to comment on my interesting lists. In fact, sometimes I'll specifically fly something anti-meta just to have something different. I'm not good enough to make top tables, so at the end of the day, I might as well enjoy all the games.

Whenever people assume we've reached the end-state of the meta, I always think back to Attani Mindlink and how long it took to catch on and how several rounds of nerfs finally pushed players to discover the degeneracy that was there the whole time. The community is pretty good at finding a "good enough" top list - something that a broad base of players can fly with minimal reps and still perform well with against the field. But those lists always seem to be the low hanging fruit and we only really push beyond that when forced.

8 hours ago, Makaze said:

While I love stats as much as the next guy can we all just take a moment to recognize (or in some cases maybe realize) that the overwhelming vast majority of the X-Wing tournament player base is not composed of anything resembling rational actors? I sometimes feel like behavioral economics needs to ****slap us all...

You buy into economic theory about rational actors? At all? Weird. I'm not even sure that corporations are rational actors and, in theory, they should be closer to behind that since they're supposed to be composed of humans that can check each other's biases to get closer to actual rationality.

Individuals are shockingly non-rational, even on life changing decisions. Presuming any serious thought would actually go into which list to use is very hopeful.

Behavioural economics is meant to "force" people into what you believe is a rational choice. It's still very open to biases introduced by the designers on top of not being overly efficient at guaranteeing outcomes (given that some actors are actively irrational and will, on purpose, make the "wrong" choice).

7 minutes ago, drjkel said:

You buy into economic theory about rational actors? At all? Weird.

Individuals are shockingly non-rational,

Umm...

1 hour ago, Tlfj200 said:

It always astounds me when people presume almost anything is efficient, particularly a game where no real $ is involved.

You can see it in how us tryhards talk about results. If it really were a field of competitive players, 3-3 would be considered a pretty okay result, and 4-2 would be good (like 11-5 in an NFL season). So often 4-2 is considered borderline by competitive players, the lowest score they're not actively disappointed with, because much of the field is just there to have fun. Whether they're just there to play, or tryharding with suboptimal lists because they think that's fun, it pads the stats of an uncompromised tryhard (like an NCAA football schedule with non-conference easy games in the beginning).

1 hour ago, Transmogrifier said:

Whenever people assume we've reached the end-state of the meta, I always think back to Attani Mindlink and how long it took to catch on and how several rounds of nerfs finally pushed players to discover the degeneracy that was there the whole time. The community is pretty good at finding a "good enough" top list - something that a broad base of players can fly with minimal reps and still perform well with against the field. But those lists always seem to be the low hanging fruit and we only really push beyond that when forced.

But that degeneracy was worse than other lists before nerfs, that's why it wasn't played.

26 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

You can see it in how us tryhards talk about results. If it really were a field of competitive players, 3-3 would be considered a pretty okay result, and 4-2 would be good (like 11-5 in an NFL season). So often 4-2 is considered borderline by competitive players, the lowest score they're not actively disappointed with, because much of the field is just there to have fun. Whether they're just there to play, or tryharding with suboptimal lists because they think that's fun, it pads the stats of an uncompromised tryhard (like an NCAA football schedule with non-conference easy games in the beginning).

Competitive X-Wing is weird.

Hi Forums

No Ones Ever Really Gone

Why you no talk about how rangeless force charges old guy is back?

11 minutes ago, Boom Owl said:

Hi Forums

No Ones Ever Really Gone

Why you no talk about how rangeless force charges old guy is back?

They buffed palpatine between editions and no one noticed! panic!

1 hour ago, Biophysical said:

You can see it in how us tryhards talk about results. If it really were a field of competitive players, 3-3 would be considered a pretty okay result, and 4-2 would be good (like 11-5 in an NFL season). So often 4-2 is considered borderline by competitive players, the lowest score they're not actively disappointed with, because much of the field is just there to have fun. Whether they're just there to play, or tryharding with suboptimal lists because they think that's fun, it pads the stats of an uncompromised tryhard (like an NCAA football schedule with non-conference easy games in the beginning).

I think that the game would be absolutely exhausting if I had to play other tryhards for all 6 rounds.

I flew Palpatine along with Maarek a little last fall.

Surefirest way I ever saw to lift the rolling focuses on defense curse. He just rolled blanks instead.

1 hour ago, drjkel said:

You buy into economic theory about rational actors?

Not at all, but most models and discussions are implicitly based on that assumption. When we talk about things like % of the field vs % in cut we're implicitly assuming that all the people who brought that it are rational actors who brought it because and played in a way to maximize their chances of winning. Which is obviously not true at all

1 hour ago, drjkel said:

Behavioural economics is meant to "force" people into what you believe is a rational choice

That's just one aspect of applied behavioral economics. You have to figure out what buttons to push before you can manipulate people by pushing them. And the first step in that is acknowledging that there are a whole lot of externalities unrelated directly to $s impacting economic models and that people often value them heavily (and some are just stupid/lazy too). It can seem self obvious but the overall field of economics, and by extension much of our base model building methodology/assumptions, has been incredibly resistant to the idea. Mostly because it's just much easier to ignore it, which is what we often do here. And that's fine in a lot of cases, not so much in others (virtually anything involving Wedge...)

Once per juke, Palp says "NO".

3 minutes ago, Makaze said:

Not at all, but most models and discussions are implicitly based on that assumption. When we talk about things like % of the field vs % in cut we're implicitly assuming that all the people who brought that it are rational actors who brought it because and played in a way to maximize their chances of winning. Which is obviously not true at all

I don’t know anyone who goes to play several hours of games with the expectation that they’ll be crushed. There are undoubtedly some, but not enough.

I think it’s more likely that everyone feels like they’re OK and enjoy their list, so ‘on average‘ they’ll go 3-3, right? Right?!?

X-Wing is interesting, in my opinion, because actors are semi-rational but all of the information is difficult or impossible to price correctly. It’s a lot easier to make bad decisions on the basis of imperfect information, and worse still when you don’t know how bad your info is.

1 hour ago, Micanthropyre said:

I think that the game would be absolutely exhausting if I had to play other tryhards for all 6 rounds.

I'm not sure. The best games are often against the best players.

Depends what Bio and you meant by tryhards

2 hours ago, drjkel said:

Individuals are shockingly non-rational, even on life changing decisions. Presuming any serious thought would actually go into which list to use is very hopeful.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely is a fine book that really explores this idea and is written to be very accessible as well. Not a book I ever expected to be recommending on a forum for the X-Wing Miniatures Game. This book (and Taleb's Fooled By Randomness) are top-notch X-Wing books, aside from the minor oversight that the authors forget to mention X-Wing specifically.

56 minutes ago, viedit said:

Once per juke, Palp says "NO".

Thats mean.

Bad Guy factions are mean.

15 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

I'm not sure. The best games are often against the best players.

Depends what Bio and you meant by tryhards

I'm loosely referring to people that actively think about the game and think about/practice their list to optimize their results. Using this definition, I agree with you. Games against people like that are more fun.

17 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

I'm not sure. The best games are often against the best players.

Depends what Bio and you meant by tryhards

Without trying getting into semantics and inciting a war....there's a big difference between knowing you are good, and thinking you are good. Matchups vs the later probably have a higher chance of being salty.

24 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

I'm not sure. The best games are often against the best players.

Depends what Bio and you meant by tryhards

8 minutes ago, Biophysical said:

I'm loosely referring to people that actively think about the game and think about/practice their list to optimize their results. Using this definition, I agree with you. Games against people like that are more fun.

God, most of my tournaments are me hoping I don't lose early so I can learn from losing to a good player later

10 minutes ago, viedit said:

Without trying getting into semantics and inciting a war....there's a big difference between knowing you are good, and thinking you are good. Matchups vs the later probably have a higher chance of being salty.

I'm pretty sure none of us are actually good, except for like 3 people. Feel free to debate who those people are...