I'm working on an idea for a fan-made public playtest (I've made quite a few changes since last posting here), as a lot of people (mostly the S&V podcast, but They count as a couple dozen people) have said that Public play testing for FAQ/Errata would be a potential way to remove the current rut that X-wing is in, design wise.

Looking at meta analysis, the intent is to lower the current power level to something roughly around the release of the TFA core set, and then flattening it.

I'm working on hammering down the strongest list archetypes, and removing the most obnoxious NPE's. There are some issues that I haven't been able to find a fix that I like well enough to propose it as part of a fan-errata that would build upon the leaked FAQ.

I would appreciate any commentary/help on coming up with more interesting, balanced, and fun mechanics for these cards- Note that i would be nerfing most current meta powerhouses, and buffing some of the weaker ships in the game.

Note- MoV scoring system- One of the actual changes to the ruleset would be the removal of half points on large ships, and the addition of half points on any ship that costs 26 or more. It never mattered how physically large the ship was when it was running away to conserve MOV- it mattered how expensive it was. This change would stop beating around the bush and stop encouraging points fortresses. (potentially doing quarter-points at 52+ point ships)

• First up on the chopping block is Kylo Ren- While not currently overpowered in the meta, if everything is nerfed to wave 7 levels, he would become a serious threat, and he is massively unfun to play against. The issue isn't the crew in combination with the condition card- I would need a suggestion for a different ISYTDS condition card or a different rules text on his crew card.

• Next up is Rebel Regen (R5-P9, Miranda, R2-d2)- These three abilities also need to be addressed. having your damage not matter is also not fun to experience, and it encourages running away. I had mulled over changing it in 2 ways- making them work like R2D2 crew (only working when shield-less) or making it not preserve MoV. The first is a heavy nerf that I would like to avoid, and the second would need to be incredibly technical. I'm looking for help on designing a change to this.

Anyways, any advice would be appreciated.

okay perfect got a few sugestions.

1. Ban turrets
2. Ban LArge based ships
3. No moar sheld regen (you can have an evade token instead, its the same thing)
4. Ban Biggs
5. Ban all titles and fixes (TIE Defenders were perfectly fine before Imperial Veterans came and screwed up the entire meta)
6. all face up damage cards count as direct hits
7. ban bombs and Sabine and Cad crew
8. Ban all scum ships (except boba Fet he's cool)
9. all points is now based upon jousting values.
10. If it goes to time the player that is running away loses for slow playing and being a coward that doesn't face death like a true player.
11. All rebels playrs must include 1 (T-65) X-wing as it is the name of the game and it will make X-wings great again (except for biggs, hes been banned and is supposed to reamin dead)
12. Imperials have the right of win. (yup they win just by being imperials unless you can blow up a death star Imperials always win).
13. Cannon upgrades are now +10 points
14. Imperial players are not allowed to play TIE Phantoms.

I'd like to thank the community especially the FFG X-wing forums for making this Community Driven F.A.Q. possible .

Way to be dismissive- obviously I would set up some sort of submission system to weed out the noise, wouldn't base it solely on the responses from the screamfest that is this forum, and it would go through multiple drafts-

Being super dismissive doesn't prevent the game's rules/balance from degenerating futher into a 7th-edition-40k-esque mess.

I see it happening already, the 2 camps that formed in 40k are forming here- bad tryhard competitive players that need unbalanced lists as a crutch screaming that nerfs are unfair, and militant casuals that view list optimization as a crime who wrongly associate balance changes as being only for comp players.

I don't want X-wing to go down the same shitter that 40k went down, you could at least provide helpful commentary rather than just being a ********.

One change I've been pondering is the one modification per ship rule. Many ships are highly customizable according to lore and whatnot, why not incorporate that? I think the way to do this would be first, make all 0 point mods cost 1 point and second, each ship would have a modification number. This number would be the total number of points it could spend on modifications. Something like the HWK could have around 4-5 modification points while a TIE fighter should have only 2. The Firespray might have 5-6. It would take some testing to work out the kinks and there would have to be a change made to the Royal Guard title. Of course, this may be going against your idea of powering the game down.

Edit: If you want to really power the game down- take this idea and apply it upgrade cards in general. Give each ship an upgrade point cap.

1. Open a Homebrew section on the forums. Ask players and FFG staff to post ideas about Game Mechanics, Ship dials/stats, Pilot abilities, etc...
2. Open an Alpha Testing section on the forums. Cherry pick the most fun and interesting ideas from the Homebrew section (probably less than 1%). Ask the community to play test these ideas with what is currently in the game, and what is in Alpha Testing.
3. Open an Open Beta Testing section on the forums. Ask the community what they would like in future expansions based on what is in Alpha Testing.
4. Closed Beta tests proceed similar to now, but have a bit more info to pull from.

As for your idea, I'd start with making one with friends for casual night. Then talk to stores in the area about making one Themed Events. Then ask the people of the internet.

21 minutes ago, wfain said:

One change I've been pondering is the one modification per ship rule. Many ships are highly customizable according to lore and whatnot, why not incorporate that? I think the way to do this would be first, make all 0 point mods cost 1 point and second, each ship would have a modification number. This number would be the total number of points it could spend on modifications. Something like the HWK could have around 4-5 modification points while a TIE fighter should have only 2. The Firespray might have 5-6. It would take some testing to work out the kinks and there would have to be a change made to the Royal Guard title. Of course, this may be going against your idea of powering the game down.

Edit: If you want to really power the game down- take this idea and apply it upgrade cards in general. Give each ship an upgrade point cap.

My issue is that this fundamentally re-writes the core concept of the game, and is beyond the scope of what a FAQ/Errata could feasibly hope to accomplish- that would be a complete X-wing 2.0 change. Right now I've ran some numbers and rapidly played through some ideas, and Kylo and Rebel Regen are the only problems that I can't find an at least semi-elegant solution for.

13 minutes ago, Toimu said:

1. Open a Homebrew section on the forums. Ask players and FFG staff to post ideas about Game Mechanics, Ship dials/stats, Pilot abilities, etc...
2. Open an Alpha Testing section on the forums. Cherry pick the most fun and interesting ideas from the Homebrew section (probably less than 1%). Ask the community to play test these ideas with what is currently in the game, and what is in Alpha Testing.
3. Open an Open Beta Testing section on the forums. Ask the community what they would like in future expansions based on what is in Alpha Testing.
4. Closed Beta tests proceed similar to now, but have a bit more info to pull from.

As for your idea, I'd start with making one with friends for casual night. Then talk to stores in the area about making one Themed Events. Then ask the people of the internet.

My issue with this is that expecting the public to be both the game designer and the playtester as opposed to limiting public playtesters to simply pointing out problems means that it could potentially allow for loudest voices to become the most dominant- It would use a 3rd party submission form that would keep the submissions semi-anonymous, to try to prevent that.

I'd actually start coding and setting up stuff to analyze the data fairly soon, I've got free time since I have given up on my Markov chain X-wing AI (I realized that if there is ever a TLT errata that the AI becomes useless and I'm pushing for a TLT nerf... )

@Kaptain Krunch unfortunately you will find no sort of valid growth of this on these forums. I've tried something similar and it had utterly no success. Most will contribute poor ideas, many will post as if any such discussion is dumb and post pointless posts making themselves look like idiots while they try to point out how silly this is (as you've already seen), and any valued contribution will be countered or decried as someone who needs to "stop whining" or "git gud".

You are probably better off creating some sort of communication channel with a select number of well respected contributors through Slack or something similar and building this with them.

7 minutes ago, Kdubb said:

@Kaptain Krunch unfortunately you will find no sort of valid growth of this on these forums. I've tried something similar and it had utterly no success. Most will contribute poor ideas, many will post as if any such discussion is dumb and post pointless posts making themselves look like idiots while they try to point out how silly this is (as you've already seen), and any valued contribution will be countered or decried as someone who needs to "stop whining" or "git gud".

You are probably better off creating some sort of communication channel with a select number of well respected contributors through Slack or something similar and building this with them.

Yeah, I've poured this post and looked for advice on my FAQ/Eratta draft on a couple of sites-Reddit was the least useful, and 4chan was the most helpful- The theory I've heard is that since there is no identity tied to opinions there, people are are less defensive of their opinions. There are always nuggets of gold in the crap no matter where you look- here you need to look for people with funny names or are on podcasts.

At this point, All I need is some sort of idea as to what to do with Kylo and Rebel Regen since those are the 2 problems that I can't think of an elegant solution for on my own. I'm debating just leaving them both out of the first draft and hoping they push each other out of the meta.

I'd be using a 3rd party website for the actual data collection either way. I'd want to be able to take data collection from randos- it would at least give bulk data that has to be useful for something, no matter how bad they are at the game.

And short of world-class players, and more game design groups like the Krayt and S&V podcasts, who would be a good fit for this and would be interested in it? The core of this would be to collect the playtest data from as many sources as possible, and to have a select team work with analyzed data to make changes.

24 minutes ago, Kaptin Krunch said:

At this point, All I need is some sort of idea as to what to do with Kylo and Rebel Regen since those are the 2 problems that I can't think of an elegant solution for on my own. I'm debating just leaving them both out of the first draft and hoping they push each other out of the meta.

Kylo is pretty simple - rule that his ability does not work through shields. He's still threatening to shieldless ships, but I think that's thematic - flying without shields is inherently risky.

Regen is trickier. It might be enough to cap all regen abilities as only working up to two shields - It's enough to keep the regen relevant while still making it fairly feasible to land hull damage.

Just now, hargleblarg said:

Kylo is pretty simple - rule that his ability does not work through shields. He's still threatening to shieldless ships, but I think that's thematic - flying without shields is inherently risky.

Regen is trickier. It might be enough to cap all regen abilities as only working up to two shields - It's enough to keep the regen relevant while still making it fairly feasible to land hull damage.

Do you mean having regen only work when you have 1 or less shield, or do you mean only being able to regen 2 shields per game? I've heard the suggestion of "you can only regen X shields per game" before.

For Kylo, the issue isn't that he's super OP- He's good/decent, but does very poorly against 4+ ship lists- The issue is that handing someone 2 Blinded pilots and a damaged cockpit is not fun for them. I'd probably have to re-do the condition entirely. Maybe making it so that crits on the defender become Maarek-Stele-crits? I have no idea here.

12 minutes ago, Kaptin Krunch said:

Do you mean having regen only work when you have 1 or less shield, or do you mean only being able to regen 2 shields per game? I've heard the suggestion of "you can only regen X shields per game" before.

For Kylo, the issue isn't that he's super OP- He's good/decent, but does very poorly against 4+ ship lists- The issue is that handing someone 2 Blinded pilots and a damaged cockpit is not fun for them. I'd probably have to re-do the condition entirely. Maybe making it so that crits on the defender become Maarek-Stele-crits? I have no idea here.

Regen would work at 1 or fewer shields. Pushing three damage through in a round is pretty reasonable against 1-2 agility ships, and it makes landing the first damage extra relevant where before it was nigh pointless. I can't be certain, but I suspect that would curb a lot of regen's power.

The trick with Kylo is that he's basically run on either Rac or as a pilot. In either case, both ships can be burnt to the ground quickly with enough focused fire, enough that he's not likely to trigger isytds more than once or twice if he has to burn through a ship's shields first. Kylo being able to push such impactful crits through shields is largely what makes him frustrating.

I'm also going to run into the same thing, since I'm completely overhauling the game with my own rules (much bigger overhaul). I'm planning a private alpha first, then a public beta. I'm curious how far in you are, and how in depth your changes are. Part of my overall design philosophy is for stress to be the universal currency of tactical tradeoff. My current penned-in change for Kylo's wording is:

ACTION: Assign the "I'll Show You the Dark Side" Condition card to an enemy ship at Range 1-3. Then receive one stress token.

Also, I have the same exact thought on the MoV scoring system. 26+ points --> score half points. Going above 4x identical ships seems to be a nice breakpoint.

I'm interested in chipping in/reviewing any community-led efforts to right the ship.

4 hours ago, MajorJuggler said:

Also, I have the same exact thought on the MoV scoring system. 26+ points --> score half points. Going above 4x identical ships seems to be a nice breakpoint.

You'd need some strong controls across rebel regen, I think.

5 hours ago, Kaptin Krunch said:

Do you mean having regen only work when you have 1 or less shield, or do you mean only being able to regen 2 shields per game? I've heard the suggestion of "you can only regen X shields per game" before.

That's actually not all that hard to manage:

• "Gonk" has a nice mechanic - you spend an action to place a shield token on 'Gonk', which you later remove to recover shields on the ship.
• If you want to limit the number of shields any other upgrade can recover, give it a 'starting number' of shields on the upgrade card - as with Gonk, when regen triggers (by a green move, spending a focus, or whatever) one is removed from the upgrade card and assigned to the ship.
• If you have no remaining shields on the upgrade card, you can therefore no longer regen shields.
• Gonk is obviously good in that he has a mechanic to add more shields to the card, but this is because he doesn't start with any, and has to 'charge up' in the early game.
• This leaves you with two questions: 1) what number of shields is 'acceptable' for R2-D2 (for example) to add during a game? and 2) how do you manage Miranda Doni? - with this approach you'd need to keep her current shield tokens seperate from her potential future shield tokens.
• Margin of Victory/percentage points can remain the same. As long as there's a limit to how much you can regenerate, the issue of partial MoV vs Regen is a limited one; the whole point of a shield regen ship is that it should require 150% of its theoretical damage capacity (or whatever) to actually kill it.

I think any Damage Displacement ability (Biggs, Shield Regen, etc..) should have a limited number of uses per game.

Mines and Bombs might need a higher cost. But I'm getting off topic.

Why not do what ffg has been doing: roll an Epic game mechanic into smaller ships.

For regen, I propose energy. So, for R2-D2 to seven a shield, he'd need 3 energy. How does he gain energy? Same way he regens now: do a green maneuver.

It slows down the Rebel player's ability to negate damage and forces them to think a bit more: do I build up that charge early game to use later or zoom in, do damage and try to build that charge during a dog fight?

This same mechanic can carry over to the other regen/repair droids as well as Miranda. It doesn't remove a mechanic from the game, it doesn't change what the card fundamentally does, and the ability can be negated with abilities and current game mechanics.

Just two thoughts:

This could potentially jeopardize work by FFG

Do you intend to simply patch the current game? Because IMO that's not enough, instead we need a more complete overhaul in the way @MajorJuggler is currently doing.

6 hours ago, MajorJuggler said:

I'm also going to run into the same thing, since I'm completely overhauling the game with my own rules (much bigger overhaul). I'm planning a private alpha first, then a public beta. I'm curious how far in you are, and how in depth your changes are. Part of my overall design philosophy is for stress to be the universal currency of tactical tradeoff. My current penned-in change for Kylo's wording is:

ACTION: Assign the "I'll Show You the Dark Side" Condition card to an enemy ship at Range 1-3. Then receive one stress token.

Also, I have the same exact thought on the MoV scoring system. 26+ points --> score half points. Going above 4x identical ships seems to be a nice breakpoint.

You can see my first draft for this FAQ- I actually had the same change for Kylo, I just didn't like it since it does not address him being an NPE. I have been making more cards stress-vulnerable though.

For the half-point MoV limit, all I knew was that it should be between 24 and 30-I went with 26 since having more than a quarter of a list run away seemes like a good breakpoint.

My intended scale is for this FaQ and current FaQ to be physically releasable as part of a $15 deck of cards, so that it would limit the number of cards that could be re-done. Right now it's mostly Nerfs, since buffs to weak iconic ships is less pressing.

1 hour ago, GreenDragoon said:

Just two thoughts:

This could potentially jeopardize work by FFG

Do you intend to simply patch the current game? Because IMO that's not enough, instead we need a more complete overhaul in the way @MajorJuggler is currently doing.

How would this potentially jepordize anything? It would be simple enough to add a disclaimer to the released drafts that would allow FFG to copy them at any point- that would be the intent at least, eventually we would submit it to FFG alongside documentation (to show our work) and ask them to release it as a FAQ/errata.

1 hour ago, Kaptin Krunch said:

How would this potentially jepordize anything? It would be simple enough to add a disclaimer to the released drafts that would allow FFG to copy them at any point- that would be the intent at least, eventually we would submit it to FFG alongside documentation (to show our work) and ask them to release it as a FAQ/errata.

Take a look at this post

Quote

So I took it upon myself to design my own points system. It was just simple addition and multiplication of the model's stats, and it worked really well. Everyone liked it. Took maybe 30 seconds to calculate. It was the ONLY points system for around 8 months or so. I told CGL publicly and in multiple places that they were free to use mine, I just wanted a credit and no payment whatsoever, it was fine yo, just USE IT BECAUSE IT'S WHAT THE GAME NEEDS.

THEN CGL announced their own points system, which was a really complicated set of multiple formulae and fractional multiplication and different lookups and took about 3-5 minutes to look up... and matched my results to 1-2 points with 90% of cases out of a field with 2500+ entries . That's a FEAT, dude, that in 2 weeks I came up with something which equalled the best work of a group of game designers working over months.

A year and a half later, I was talking with a game dev in a private chat and he told me that what was released was their SECOND system. They'd come up with an addition/multiplication based formula that looked WAY too close to mine, and were forced to abandon it due to legal concerns . It... frankly, it ruined me for a couple of days. Had I unintentionally sabotaged their efforts? Done something bad?

I think that's a very valuable lesson. There's no fair use system here. I understand that you have the best intentions, but it could turn out to be pretty bad.

17 minutes ago, GreenDragoon said:

Take a look at this post

I think that's a very valuable lesson. There's no fair use system here. I understand that you have the best intentions, but it could turn out to be pretty bad.

I guess we need a lawyer, not just Designers/Engineers/Statisticians then- we could reach out to FFG before we publish the FAQ draft.

Ban Biggs

Ban Jumpmaster

Ban Bomblet Generator

Ban Sabine

Ban Cad Bane

Ban Deadeye

Ban TLT

Ban Auto-thrusters (no TLT, no need for AT)

X-wing -1 point adjustment

R2D2 - give 2 tokens, add text to card: everytime you regen you discard a token, if you have no tokens left you may discard the card to regen one more shield.

Keep up the good thoughts and work @Kaptain Krunch ; ignore the outlier info as that stuff is so common on forums from people who have no life. I think you're doing great in plowing this field, as @MajorJuggler is....I applaud this!!

Rebel Regen just needs a cap; akin to rebuild shields to the limit of your original shields (effectively doubling your shield value).

Kylo, IDK, he's not seen locally.

Shalom

The game needs a major overhaul, and I doubt we'll see FFG do it anytime soon. I've been hashing out ideas in my local group for a v2.0, and they're been well received, some of us might try to expand on it.

Honestly I think that the best you can hope for, trying to do something like that via these forums will be a nightmare, just look at where how scattered and augmentative the posts get for the custom card league, prequel-era vassal mod, and other homebrew. HotAC is one of the few that was successful and that was worked out in a local x-wing group long enough that when the rest of us saw it, it was already up to version 6.

I think the easiest way for FFG to improve the busted state of X-wing now is to up the match to somewhere between 120 -150 (this should have several effects that I don't feel like typing up right now), and/or adopt Infinity's use of an official squad builder where FFG can adjust the cost of ships and upgrades as the game expands in order to regain and maintain balance. These only help tournament players,not kitchen tablers.

@Kaptin Krunch I think you are missing the problem on Kylo when trying to rain him in and you said yourself his issue in your opinion is the npe of blinded pilot and damaged cockpit. The problem therefore is the damage deck not kylo, since these 2 options are what people are gonna do with kylo then make his ability one of these 2 effects but not place a damage card on the ship. You get hit with isytd and the attacker picks pilot skill 0 for one turn or weapons disabled for one turn but no damage assigned. He's still useful but not causing damage.

Regen I believe could be fixed with a simple rewording of (outside gonk because he has his own limiter) when you regen a shield you also receive and ion token. It makes shield regen predictible and eliminates running around the board evade regening to time. It also demonstrates a rerouting of engine power to gain shield strength. I don't really like assigning an ion token but it was the only way I could achieve the effect I intended within the current rules. Perhaps make a special ion token that allows the boost manuever instead of just one straight to remove it but then you are getting into rules variants instead of faq land even though I find it a more fair solution.