1 hour ago, mdl0114 said:

Congrats on a good showing, but be careful trying to extrapolate the state of the game as a whole from one limited run performance. It's an extremely small sample size to stand on while saying "everyone who says otherwise is wrong, the game balance is fine".

I've gone undefeated with Wedge, Wes, and a U-wing at a league night, seen triple rebel hwk-290s beat a Corran and allies, went 4-1 with a Talonbane Cobra list, beat Paratanni with scum aces, and got crushed by a list with procket and accuracy corrector Tempest Squadron TIE advances.

There are plenty of variables that go into a given game of X-Wing, player skill disparity and dice luck included. Small events and individual game results are more likely to be affected this way. The closer the player skill comes to being equal, and the more games played, the more we would expect luck to average out over time and we can consider player skill to be equivalent, if not always 100% equal.

When something consistently does extremely well over a long period of time (Dengar, other Jumpmasters, Miranda, Biggs, etc) or is heavily represented at the top of a large, many player event (Nym, Jumpmasters, Miranda, Biggs), its at least worth considering that the reasons that only certain things are doing so well consistently is because of a power imbalance.

It's still possible to do well individually with ships that are strictly speaking not high level competitive, especially if you are skilled with your list, your opponents are unfamiliar with yours or their own list, your skill level exceeds theirs, or any number of other reasons. You also might have discovered an incredible combo that will soon be sweeping the meta, someone had to be the first to play Dengaroo after all. But taking a 12 player sample tournament and extrapolating your own performance out to the overall state of the meta is not going to hold up.

That was an example I listed based on what I am able to attend, that tournament was a 2.5h drive from me. It's also the only Store Champ + tournament I have played after Nym was released. It's the data I have.

To explain my own experiences further beyond the store championship listed in my original post.

Right before nym was released I won our store championship here with Quickdraw + Rexlar + the inquister. Shutting down several jump masters to do so (i believe it was also a 12 man)

Two weeks before that I won our kit tournament running 5X M3A's with Manglers (again another 12 or so player) and again killing off the "OP" ships.

We had a 34 person regionals this year and I came in 9th (was not happy with my play but came up against some good pilots) running 3x stirkers and Hux on the new shuttle. (last years season I won several kit tournament and came in second in both our regionals and store championship again running good lists but not meta copy pasted lists)

I did not want to go through listing all my results and tournaments but you are the second (or third) person to post basically saying my opinions are invalid because I sighted a small tournament. Regardless of what anyone has played in or how well they did everyone's opinions on the game and how they feel about balance should matter. All I have about how I feel about the game is my own play experiences. And those experiences say that there are no crazy overpowered ships they can all be beaten with solid list building backed with solid flying.

Is the game perfect? no not at all but it is nowhere near what these forums would tell you. Are there ships that I don't think are good compared to other ships? of course, there are but they are formed based on my own actual play experiences not data from tournaments I was not in.

1 hour ago, mdl0114 said:

When something consistently does extremely well over a long period of time (Dengar, other Jumpmasters, Miranda, Biggs, etc) or is heavily represented at the top of a large, many player event (Nym, Jumpmasters, Miranda, Biggs), its at least worth considering that the reasons that only certain things are doing so well consistently is because of a power imbalance.

1

There is also an insanely strong positive feedback loop, when a list does well or wins a major tournament it all the sudden pops up everywhere flown by good players who are trying to replicate that success. With the list/ship now showing up everywhere and being flown by people who are skilled it wins even more and is represented very well even more and the feedback loop grows. I see it locally after every major event in the world there will be at least one copy of that list show up.

Lastly, I am not saying there is a perfect balance, what I am saying is this forum view on balance is completely off base, for the most part any slight imbalance is immediately taken to the extream of something being overpowered or not viable.

18 minutes ago, Icelom said:

any slight imbalance is immediately taken to the extreme of something being overpowered or not viable.

This happens here so much. I've never played a game where everything was expected to be 'balanced' so as to be competitively useful, except this one, according to these forums. It's super dumb. Games with variable pieces from which players can choose will always have pieces which are better or worse than others, if they were all the same amount of good, or balanced, they would be the same piece. Would you play this game if it were only X-Wings? I wouldn't. Now- maybe the real impetus behind these cries is that people here are passionate about Star Wars and want iconic OT ships to be the best (which doesn't make sense form a lore perspective btw, Rebels would fly whatever they could afford and Imperials would look to mass produce things as efficiently as possible, while individual flyers, I.e. Scum, might look to kit out their personal ships in order to serve their specific needs), but the nonsense about all things needing to be balanced has got to stop. I imagine that we could un-Nerf everything back to the cloak and the game would still be very fun. Maybe the Empire is a little down right now, but it still has plenty of playable and competitive ships.

You seem to be a strong player in your local area, winning consistently with a variety of lists, well done. It doesn't matter that you had to drive 2.5 hours away, when you try to make a sweeping claim about the state of the game using your personal experiences in a very limited setting and sample size yes, your sweeping generalization is suspect. Feelings aren't data. You can feel that the game is great because in your experience everything is fine, but if your experience is in a limited setting the conclusion you make is suspect. You said yourself you formed your opinion from your own personal experiences, which only account for a limited sampling of all experiences. If I claim that shorts and a T-Shirt are fine clothing options in December because all my life I've lived in warm climates, in my experience I can be entirely correct but I can't project that as a sweeping generalization to the world as a whole and tell everyone else who says different that they're wrong. Opinions don't matter, you can hold whatever opinion you want. The actual facts matter and larger sample sizes are more relevant data than smaller ones.

Also, what feedback loop created Dengar/Tel? Or Nand's World's list? Or Nym Corran, or Nym/everything else? Did we have only one in sixteen players at GenCon playing Imperial lists, or were they disproportionally unrepresented in the top 16? Paratanni finished in the top of regionals where only a couple people brought it, all of them ending up in the top cut. There are clearly ships and ship combinations that perform much better than others. As I said before, in small settings individual player skill and dice luck can have a huge effect, and a less strong list can prevail against a stronger one. Even with Paratanni, every person playing the list didn't go undefeated every tournament. That doesn't mean Paratanni wasn't the strongest list archetype at the time it was dominant, even if I beat a paratanni running player with a jank list, because my outside the norm result doesn't invalidate the larger pool of collected data.