For the last couple of months I've noticed a sad trend. Less and less people showing up to my local game store. Less then a handful still show up to play (maybe 5). When we had up to 15 on average. We've only had 1 tournament at the store in over a year. Have you noticed a similar trend where you play? Wookiee tears are the saddest tears of all.

That's hard to say right now. Being that the last few months were summer attendance will noticeably be smaller i think.

Yes, it's been that way in the Bay Area. There have definitely been a few people coming in, but not as many as have faded out. And (although it's definitely not universally true) many of the new players are primarily interested in the power-cheese aspect of the game, which may be what brought them on-board in the first place, as I think about it.

I don't get heavily invested in non-RPGs very often. X-Wing was my follow-up (with a few years between) to Dungeons and Dragons Miniatures, which was my follow-up (with many years between) to M:tG, which I stopped playing in '96 or so. It's depressing to watch what seems to be the slow death of the game (at least around here).

People get bored and stop playing. Also, with so many meta non-iconic ships (specially in Scum), the game loses its connection with fans of the IP. I bet some people outside, when seeing a competitive table, wouldn't recognize this game as Star Wars.

Lastly, with a game that is each day more complex, the influx of new people coming in is increasingly smaller than the influx of people leaving it.

I think that if FFG continues with this model, the game will only fade away. What they need to do is to release boxed campaigns (including a simplified HotAC style cooperative box) and focus on the casual side. Not all people (like our children and wives) want to play a competitive game.

We're experiencing a similar trend in my LGS in Southern California.

I'm hoping it is just a lull due to to various factors: school is back in session, local weather (it's been as hot & humid as a Gundark's armpit over here) and quite frankly, there are too many games worth playing at the moment. Between games, I kept hearing talk of Destiny, Warhammer, Magic, Pokeman--you name it. Not to mention games that are coming out in the near future too: SW Legion, Fallout, Legend of the 5 Rings (that's the one with the most buzz locally).

I dunno. Literally a year ago when I began playing X-wing there were more pairs of players than tables would allow. Things really started to drop off after the Great Nerfing happened. Maybe people really enjoyed flying that flavor of OP lists?

There are at least 4 of us that show up regularly every X-wing night. I don't mind it because we're bringing all kinds of off the wall things.

During Store Champs season there was a more focused effort to bring competitive lists and we saw old faces coming into the shop. Having said that, the two SCs that I attended looked very healthy and only a handful of Meta lists (maybe 1 out of every 6 or seven).

Everything is cyclical. People will come back as the Last Jedi approaches.

Yeah, I dunno if it's burnout or because it's off-season now or what. My LGS has recently had the fewest number of players show up that I've ever seen since I started playing the game. People have left and new people have joined, but it feels like the former is outweighing the latter recently.

summer......

I had higher expectations out of Wave 11, Nym broke the game. Its just not as fun anymore and its frustrating to play against and too boring to use.

I've not gone to my LGS in 3 weeks now out of being disillusioned - the state of the game is not a good one.

Very sad news indeed. I'm hoping that the tie-in ships from last Jedi will give another surge of new players like TFA did.

Though of course the momentum is not as huge, given that TFA is the first after a long while..

The stores here in Vancouver are as busy and full as ever. Hope your stores turn things around.

If anything, quite the opposite. We've had more new players in the last couple of months than usually, a number of older players returning, and frequent weeks where we're on the raggedy edge of having more players than tables.

in my group, this year, 3 people stops playing and sell everything.

But at least 4-6 players starts.

We've got a strong community in Norwich (UK), and have had a chunk of new players start recently. We're averaging about 12-16 people on our regular Wednesday game nights, and 16-30+ folks for our monthly tournaments depending on the particular format (standard 100/6 and Hangar Bay seem to be more popular than Escalation or Epic).

We've had a couple of people sell up collections and get out of the game recently as well, but that seemed to be more not having time rather than having fallen out with the game itself.

You never know how the player base will cycle. I hadn't played in almost a year, I had moved on to Armada and more recently 40k 8th edition. I am moving back to X-Wing as I realize (again) what a huge time and money sink 40k is (I will save that experience for Legion), and I recover from my burnout a bit. I have been way rejuvenated by just playing casual games and epic games. I will play in a tournament or two again in the future, but for now I'm just enjoying the game.

I started playing a year ago and there were always more players than tables...which meant around 9 or 10 a week. There had been more than that before I started. Now it's been me and one other guy driving who drives almost 2 hours (and he's been busy the past few weeks so the x-wing night at the FLGS has been empty). 1 or 2 others might pop up every now and then and another 1 or 2 would be there but for work. But plenty have quit for other games or too strong a desire for 2.0.

Sad Wookie indeed.

17 hours ago, Fuzzywookie said:

For the last couple of months I've noticed a sad trend. Less and less people showing up to my local game store. Less then a handful still show up to play (maybe 5). When we had up to 15 on average. We've only had 1 tournament at the store in over a year. Have you noticed a similar trend where you play? Wookiee tears are the saddest tears of all.

Congrats Fuzzy, that's like the longest post I've seen you write! My LGS seems to have a pretty consistent turn out most of the time, but I did not go that often. Kids, job and family illness take up way too much time to get out of the house that often.

Didn't even read the post, just going to respond to the title question:

When Han dies, I think Chewie's rage against the Stormtroopers could be considered sad.

Or how bout in the first episode of Rebels when they go to Kessel?

Not to mention Life Debt and HTTE.

11 hours ago, Kalandros said:

I had higher expectations out of Wave 11, Nym broke the game. Its just not as fun anymore and its frustrating to play against and too boring to use.

I've not gone to my LGS in 3 weeks now out of being disillusioned - the state of the game is not a good one.

Insert one of the various nym counters here: wedge, zuckuss, alpha strike Vader, etc.

Our LGS has been slowing down lately too. We don't always play the meta in Texas, but I think the issue is that original trilogy ships just are not competitive anymore
Everyone wants to fly X-Wings and Tie Fighters, not toilet seats and wings that drop bombs.

My lgs only seems to get its old attendance when we host some off the wall format tourney, otherwise we maybe get 4-6. These are troubled times we live in.

21 hours ago, Odanan said:

People get bored and stop playing. Also, with so many meta non-iconic ships (specially in Scum), the game loses its connection with fans of the IP. I bet some people outside, when seeing a competitive table, wouldn't recognize this game as Star Wars.

Lastly, with a game that is each day more complex, the influx of new people coming in is increasingly smaller than the influx of people leaving it.

I think that if FFG continues with this model, the game will only fade away. What they need to do is to release boxed campaigns (including a simplified HotAC style cooperative box) and focus on the casual side. Not all people (like our children and wives) want to play a competitive game.

I think this nails it. They need to either fix the iconic ships for tournament play for more IP exposure or start branching out the casual side of the game. HOTAC is extremely popular with the XWM casual crowd. They're leaving money on the table by not doing a campaign of some sort. If they released a fun, thematic campaign, I might be able to lure my wife and daughter into playing. If they go this route, they need to be careful to keep it user-friendly, though. Casuals don't care about math-wing, meta lists or overly-complicated mechanics - they care about Star Wars. They need a fun, simple cooperative campaign. A solo option wouldn't hurt sales either.

1 hour ago, Force Majeure said:

This is brilliant!

X-Wing remains a strong seller for FFG. But maybe it's just reflex purchases from recovering X-Wing must-have-it-all addicts. The scene has definitely dropped to near nothing in all 5 stores in this area. But come tournament time they do seem to come out of nowhere.