I channeled Yoda and made this infographic to channel the annotate the history of the X-Wing's Power Curve. Please enjoy! Thanks @blairbunke for inspiring me to do this, and the S&V Podcast for ironing out the order of things with me. EDIT: Here's the Google drawing link for posterity.

Also the discussion of X-wing forums, although you are missing Whisper, he had a lot of hate back in the day.

Although amusing your graph is never gonna be complete unless you include pre-nerf Phantoms.
Arguably their nerfing is a nodal point in X-Wing history since it was the first hard fix applied by FFG.
It was the first time FFG yielded to the nerf cries and started walking on the slippery path down.

1 minute ago, tsondaboy said:

Although amusing your graph is never gonna be complete unless you include pre-nerf Phantoms.
Arguably their nerfing is a nodal point in X-Wing history since it was the first hard fix applied by FFG.
It was the first time FFG yielded to the nerf cries and started walking on the slippery path down.

Be careful too much salt can cause heart disease

The scary thing is, even if you un-nerfed the phantom, I'm not sure it would be all that OP anymore given how the game has shifted.

How do you think the meta would be affected if ALL of the FAQ erratas were rolled back? (technically R4 agromech still wouldn't combo with deadeye according to timing chart)

2 hours ago, CRCL said:

Be careful too much salt can cause heart disease

The scary thing is, even if you un-nerfed the phantom, I'm not sure it would be all that OP anymore given how the game has shifted.

Another scary thing is, Soontir used to be tip top meta. Phantoms can easily be reverted nowadays =D

1 hour ago, KommanderKeldoth said:

How do you think the meta would be affected if ALL of the FAQ erratas were rolled back? (technically R4 agromech still wouldn't combo with deadeye according to timing chart)

Still no to large ship point fortressing.

And Jmk still needs more nerfs.

Also, large ship barrel roll remains how it is now.

I'm not sure that chart's quite right. TLTs were another answer to the Falcon meta along with Autothrusters, rather than an answer to Autothrusters. You don't call & response in successive waves, they're separated by a significant period.

It's hard to talk about Wave 8 & 9 without reference to weak Scum Waves 6 & 7 as well. That's a separate axis that interacted with and amplified the existing wobbles.

First we complained about TIE swarms being too good.
Then we complained about Phantoms.
Then we complained about Fat Han.
Then we complained about TLT Spam.
Then we complained about AceWing.
Then we complained about x7 Defenders.
Then we complained about ScumWing.
Then we complained about Attanni.
Then we complained about Alphastrikes.
Then we complained about BombWing.
And through it all we've complained about Biggs...

....bearing in mind during this time we've also demanded...

A buff to large ships
A buff to Y-Wings
A third faction
Ordnance that's actually worth paying for
More and better ways of using bombs
A buff to fragile ace pilots
A buff to TIE Defenders
Useable Scum aces
And through it all we've demanded a buff to the X-Wing...

...we really are a fickle little lot, aren't we?

21 minutes ago, FTS Gecko said:

First we complained about TIE swarms being too good.
Then we complained about Phantoms.
Then we complained about Fat Han.
Then we complained about TLT Spam.
Then we complained about AceWing.
Then we complained about x7 Defenders.
Then we complained about ScumWing.
Then we complained about Attanni.
Then we complained about Alphastrikes.
Then we complained about BombWing.
And through it all we've complained about Biggs...

....bearing in mind during this time we've also demanded...

FFG really have been **** for a long time haven't they.

I think this really hammers down the point made the other day that the game has been spiralling out of control ever since Whisper/Han. The fixes to those problems have just reverberated down the years as further and further oscillation from a point of balance.

It's why I've broadly stopped complaining. It's ****. It's going to stay ****. In fact it's highly likely that it's going to get more **** in future, not less ****. If you can accept all that then carry on playing.

One thing about Biggs, though. I'm going back in meta-wing and compiling historical metagames - I've got as far back as summer 2015 and the interesting thing is Rebels are doing really well but Biggs isn't here - he doesn't really show up in a big way until Deadeye was nerfed.

I think Biggs is a part of combowing, in that he protects the combo pieces you put together. He clearly wasn't integral before to the non-combowing Rebel squads. The way the game has been pushed is making Biggs a bigger and bigger problem rather than solving him.

9 minutes ago, Stay On The Leader said:

FFG really have been **** for a long time haven't they.

Can't really put all the blame on FFG, especially when they've delivered what the players were asking for. At the end of the day the community needs to take some responsibility as well.

Look at Palp and x7 for example.

A few clever and enterprising players like @Biophysical aside, the player base was bewailing how underpowered and expensive the TIE Defender was, labelling it DOA. They also complained about how underpowered the TIE Advanced was, and how fragile Imperial Aces were when pitted against the then-dominant Fat Turrets. Over the course of the next year or so we received incremental buffs to all of the above with Autothrusters, Palpatine, TIE/x1, TIE/x7 and TIE/D. They all added up to some extremely powerful combinations (although, would pre-nerf Palp Aces and x7 really be too much in today's environment?), and it didn't take the players long to about face and start demanding fixes to the fixes they demanded.

32 minutes ago, FTS Gecko said:

A few clever and enterprising players like @Biophysical aside, the player base was bewailing how underpowered and expensive the TIE Defender was, labelling it DOA. They also complained about how underpowered the TIE Advanced was, and how fragile Imperial Aces were when pitted against the then-dominant Fat Turrets. Over the course of the next year or so we received incremental buffs to all of the above with Autothrusters, Palpatine, TIE/x1, TIE/x7 and TIE/D. They all added up to some extremely powerful combinations (although, would pre-nerf Palp Aces and x7 really be too much in today's environment?), and it didn't take the players long to about face and start demanding fixes to the fixes they demanded.

And at no point was there ANY sense that FFG knew when enough was enough.

"Can we go a bit faster?" =/= "Can we die in a head-on-collision at 150mph?"

Meta-Wing pilot rankings by month. You'll need to zoom in...

13 minutes ago, Stay On The Leader said:

And at no point was there ANY sense that FFG knew when enough was enough.

And there was no sense that the PLAYERS knew when enough was enough either... up until the point where Palp Aces were literally everywhere at the Syetem Open, and the players suddenly decided they didn't want to live under the Empire's thumb any more.

Which brings me back to player demands and cries for "fixes" again, because it seems that every single cry for "buff this" have been followed by a "WTF plz nerf" shortly after it's actually happened.

36 minutes ago, FTS Gecko said:

And there was no sense that the PLAYERS knew when enough was enough either... up until the point where Palp Aces were literally everywhere at the Syetem Open, and the players suddenly decided they didn't want to live under the Empire's thumb any more.

Which brings me back to player demands and cries for "fixes" again, because it seems that every single cry for "buff this" have been followed by a "WTF plz nerf" shortly after it's actually happened.

But what you can rely on, every time, is the players will 'demand and cry' for the game to pushed back towards a point of balance. That the specific shape of those 'demands and cries' changes over time just illustrates have entirely useless FFG are at not completely overshooting the mark every time they try to do anything good.

"It's too hot, too hot"

FFG pours on liquid nitrogen

"Too cold, it's too cold for christ's sake!"

FFG grabs their flamethrower

"Oh my god I'm burning, I'm literally melting and dying. Put the flames out!"

FFG backs up a cement truck

"FML"

But goddamn those players are so fickle.

So continues the epitaph of X-Wing...

But, man, is it an awesome game at its core.

No, I'm not interested in casual.

Most of my group of long standing casual players who occasionally attended tourneys lost interest when it stopped looking like Star Wars and started looking like a generic space game.

Pretty S+V fighters and obscure Rebel ships look nice but don't seem to have much connection to Star Wars. If you were a member of the general public and walked in off the street to take a look could you even tell that some games were Star Wars now? I'd suggest the answer to that would be "no".

Having to buy epic ships to get vital cards, an FAQ that's almost as long as the rules and the power creep that made original trilogy ships fairly weak didn't help either.

Most of us are historical gamers but now if we want to play a space battle we have a game of Armada as we feel it's a better game all round. I do sometimes look at my fifty or so X Wing ships and miss using them though.

17 minutes ago, Bolshevik65 said:

Most of us are historical gamers but now if we want to play a space battle we have a game of Armada as we feel it's a better game all round. I do sometimes look at my fifty or so X Wing ships and miss using them though.

You're absolutely right. The appeal of X-Wing was the dog fighting and maneuvers. I don't need to pontificate here - everyone knows those two things matter not in this game any more.
Oh well..
Also, good on you for only having fifty ships. I have way too many and feel like an idiot for buying multiples of so many ships...

2 hours ago, Stay On The Leader said:

Meta-Wing pilot rankings by month. You'll need to zoom in...

so.. today's meta is the first since march '16 with all three factions represented in the top 5. wow. broken...

18 minutes ago, Rinzler in a Tie said:

You're absolutely right. The appeal of X-Wing was the dog fighting and maneuvers. I don't need to pontificate here - everyone knows those two things matter not in this game any more.
Oh well..
Also, good on you for only having fifty ships. I have way too many and feel like an idiot for buying multiples of so many ships...

Yeah, it feels like a collectable card game with a Star Wars skin now. Dogfighting and in some respects the models themselves seem irrelevant. If others are still enjoying the game then great, good for them, I'm not going to knock that but I've long since stopped collecting.

It's a minority view I know and just a personal opinion but for me too many turrets and the Scum faction killed the game. I'd have never had three factions full stop, released less ships per wave and restricted turrets to the Falcon, Dash Rendar and Y wings. But FFG are a business, they exist to make a profit so that was never going to happen and who can blame them for making the correct business decisions?

6 hours ago, Stay On The Leader said:

I'm not sure that chart's quite right. TLTs were another answer to the Falcon meta along with Autothrusters, rather than an answer to Autothrusters. You don't call & response in successive waves, they're separated by a significant period.

It's hard to talk about Wave 8 & 9 without reference to weak Scum Waves 6 & 7 as well. That's a separate axis that interacted with and amplified the existing wobbles.

@Stay On The Leader re: separate axis, that's a cool idea, it does have a gravity/mass to it (the "heaviness" of the power). Future versions may have something like that :-)

Re: Autothrusters and TLT, the timeline I have recorded is: Wave 6 Autothrusters Expansion Pack came out, with a bonus StarViper in it, and then in Wave 7 TLT came out in the K-Wing Expansion pack.

So: EU,PWT -> ATS -> TLT

1 minute ago, sozin said:

@Stay On The Leader re: separate axis, that's a cool idea, it does have a gravity/mass to it (the "heaviness" of the power). Future versions may have something like that :-)

Re: Autothrusters and TLT, the timeline I have recorded is: Wave 6 Autothrusters Expansion Pack came out, with a bonus StarViper in it, and then in Wave 7 TLT came out in the K-Wing Expansion pack.

So: EU,PWT -> ATS -> TLT

True in chronology but not in effect. ATS and TLT were both anti-Falcon/PWT measures. TLT didn't really touch the ATS ships. It's like you're calling them Rock & Paper, when they're just different types of Rock.

If you look at that pilots table I shared it's pretty clear. Pre-ATS there was just a TON of PWT ships, when ATS came out they got cut back though the strongest ones stayed in there, then TLT showed up and just cut them down almost overnight. Wave 7 hit the meta like a wrecking ball and TLT/Palp hammered down the jousters and the fat turrets.

4 hours ago, Stay On The Leader said:

One thing about Biggs, though. I'm going back in meta-wing and compiling historical metagames - I've got as far back as summer 2015 and the interesting thing is Rebels are doing really well but Biggs isn't here - he doesn't really show up in a big way until Deadeye was nerfed.

Hint: keep going back...

You'll find Biggs was in two World Championship lists, even.

3 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Hint: keep going back...

You'll find Biggs was in two World Championship lists, even.

Yeah, and I will and I'm sure he'll pop back up. As you go back you're always going to see the early stuff more, though, because it's all that was available. And god knows I'm not trying to argue Biggs is bad!

But it still blows a bit of a hole in the 'Rebels need Biggs to live' arguments, because clearly they got on just fine without him for a long time.