On 9/18/2017 at 3:47 PM, Kdubb said:

The lists always felt good to look at too. It felt like Star Wars through and through. A tie swarm. The falcon with bwing, ywing or xwing support. Mini swarm of Ties with an interceptor or two. Stuff was sweet to see on the table

I echo this sentiment and agree with your entire post. I came a little later, but most of my group was still playing this meta.

I think it's allways been pretty fun. Granted I never really compeated at the top teir stuff so yeah.

The most boring matches I have watched streamed were before the half points for large ships was added. Recently there have been a few boring games streamed where the ships mostly circled the board (fair ship rebels vs scum I think)

The two problems plauging the game for me at the moment is the poor victory and scoring methods along with the preponderance of special rules.

I started playing in Wave 1. Like, the first month it came out, I was in my local game shop playing with a couple of guys who became my good friends. That was a really exciting time. I remember looking to the future at all the cool things they could possibly release for this game.

The TIE interceptor quickly became my favorite ship, so I'd have to say that my favorite period of time was during and shortly after the release of Imperial Aces. I loved all of those pilots, and I flew Lt. Lorrir, Fel's Wrath, and 3x Alpha Sq. Pilots to so many losses, but had fun doing it.

But one ship has now surpassed even my beloved TIE interceptor. I have never had as much fun playing standard 100 pt X-wing as I have playing TIE strikers. That ship just clicked with me. It's entertaining, engaging - if I had more time to play, I would say without a doubt that Wave 10 was the best time to be playing. (Obviously, Epic play and scenarios are where it's at!)

My fondest memories were of playing the Escort Mission in the core set with my cousins. Near-perfect balance and fantastic, tense game play at 30-odd points.

Now

More choice = more fun. You know if you an your opponent love wave 1, 2, 3.... etc you can just play with those upgrades if you want. :-).

Wave 7/ the fat Han nerf. Sabine wasn't a thing, everyone was trying to make tie punishers work, and k-wings weren't broken yet. Tlt was powerful, but not quite game breaking ( for my local meta at least). Then we got the t-70 and tie/fo with the new movie and it seemed everyone was getting into the game. Back when all you had to worry about was Biggs.

of course now I leave tournament list for regionals and fly whatever at locals. Been having allot more fun that way. I'm thinking about busting out an old Howlie academy swarm for the next tournament.

Got my first games of xwing in about a month before wave 2 hit. Wave 3 I think was the best: lambadas, interceptors, swarms.. Maybe 4 before the phantom really took off and we just thought it was fun and cool.

and the first few times we did Mario Kart xwing... almost as magical as the original.

1 hour ago, Dave Grant said:

Now

More choice = more fun. You know if you an your opponent love wave 1, 2, 3.... etc you can just play with those upgrades if you want. :-).

Actually, it has be proven that too much choice leads to more stress and thus LESS fun. Granted that even now your real "choices" may still be limited when it comes to the metagame but if you don't know what those choices actually are you're going to have a LOT of chaff to sort through finding them. This is why many of us are citing around Wave 3 as the "most fun" time because we actually had choices to decide between but there also wasn't so much other junk to throw out first.

4 hours ago, FlyingAnchors said:

Wave 7/ the fat Han nerf. Sabine wasn't a thing, everyone was trying to make tie punishers work, and k-wings weren't broken yet. Tlt was powerful, but not quite game breaking ( for my local meta at least). Then we got the t-70 and tie/fo with the new movie and it seemed everyone was getting into the game. Back when all you had to worry about was Biggs.

of course now I leave tournament list for regionals and fly whatever at locals. Been having allot more fun that way. I'm thinking about busting out an old Howlie academy swarm for the next tournament.

You can put Swarm Leader on a Black Squadron Pilot and give your opponent a miserable time deciding who to shoot first. I tried this the other day and it was a fun way to bring the 7 ship TIE swarm back onto the table.

I started a couple months after wave 4 and my favorite point in the game was after wave 6 dropped. The PS race was basically gone due to the phantom decloak nerf, PWTs (and Dash) were still around but not crazy popular because of autothrusters, and TLTs, Jumpmasters, Miranda, Palpatine, and Sabine didn't exist yet. The great majority of shots came from arcs, automatic damage was rare, and action-independant dice modification only existed in Predator (which ate up your EPT) and K4 (which only the HWK and Firespray could take at the time). The only real issue at the time that I can remember was that the half points for big ships rule didn't exist yet, and sometimes people would run away with fat Han/RAC on 1 hull, but as I enjoyed hunting them down it didn't bother me too much.

My favorite time is whenever there is an action/bomb, TLT, Biggs and JMK5 free game where arcs and flying actually matter. Now throw in mostly original trilogy ships used and a dark, smooth pint and it's near perfection!

4 hours ago, clanofwolves said:

My favorite time is whenever there is an action/bomb, TLT, Biggs and JMK5 free game where arcs and flying actually matter. Now throw in mostly original trilogy ships used and a dark, smooth pint and it's near perfection!

Yesterday I flew Porkins, Dutch and Hobbie against Wulf, Norra and Dutch. Then I flew Sunny Bounder, 4 z95s and 2 Kihracx against Kylo in his Upsilon paired with Rexler Brath/d.

I'm taking my 2 lists to a large (120 players) hanger bay tournament in a fortnight where I expect to face loads of fun lists and great players from across the UK and possibly further afield. Some people will bring odd lists, some will bring the top meta but every game will be enjoyable because of the attitude of everyone.

The only place I see or read about so much negativity is here on the official forum. Even SotL is great to play against despite his concerns about the game!

3 minutes ago, Gilarius said:

The only place I see or read about so much negativity is here on the official forum. Even SotL is great to play against despite his concerns about the game!

... Or maybe even because of them? Very few people complain about stuff they don't care about.

I think this map of all ships in Wave 8 until Wave 9 shows nicely just how good the meta was back then:

Each node shows the amount of ships (times 0.005 to prevent overlap). The label shows the ship type with the exact number in brackets. Rebels had not a dominating ship, and the Empire has TIE fighters (which of course skews the node a bit because they are usually flown in high numbers). Jumpmaster was already there, but not crazy yet.

Comparably, Wave 9 to Wave 10 is crazy, dominated by Defenders above all else!

Every time I play is the most fun for me!

When I just collected the ships for shelf displays and didnt play the game..... ~_~ I dont like meta, and I like X-Wings.... = my list fails all the time.

When I started playing Epic!

Wave 7, easily. Wave 3 after that.

59 minutes ago, Vargas79 said:

Wave 7, easily. Wave 3 after that.

This is me but the other way around. I really enjoyed wave 7 a lot, but wave 3 wins for not having any TLT spam equivalent.

15 hours ago, Kdubb said:

This is me but the other way around. I really enjoyed wave 7 a lot, but wave 3 wins for not having any TLT spam equivalent.

Luckily no-one local to me ever took to quad tlt. I can count the amount of times I've played them on one hand. I appreciate this is more luck than good design.

On 9/24/2017 at 1:33 PM, Kdubb said:

This is me but the other way around. I really enjoyed wave 7 a lot, but wave 3 wins for not having any TLT spam equivalent.

This would have been me, but for the fact my local area built up a relatively large number of BroBot players in Wave 6, and once Wave 7 landed they happily set about destroying the hopes and dreams of anyone who dared even experiment with TLT Spam. I remember one game I had in which every ship fired for the first two rounds of combat; he lost a Y-wing, I lost a shield (praise Glitters & Autothrusters).

Good times.

I first bought the game in wave 2, and started playing against other people around when wave 3 came out.

I'd have to say my early days of x-wing in wave 3 were probably the best. I had my most successful Store Championship season that wave, and the Imdaar Alpha event was a lot of fun (shame they stopped doing giveaways of the new ships like that).

Tie Swarm was the only really OP/NPE list to face, with double falcons probably second but livable. Good flying and creative list building were much more rewarded back then I feel.

Then things went downhill with Fat Han and pre-nerf phantoms and the rest is history.

I still love the game a lot, but my early days were definitely my most fun and memorable.

Sad thing is that I had WAY more success as a player early in my x-wing career, even though I am now a much better player, but with less ideal results. Part of that is the player pool continually getting bigger and better, but I think power creep and lack of nerfs/buffs when needed is the bigger culprit.

The one before 4x Thug TLT.

3 hours ago, spacelion said:

The one before 4x Thug TLT.

Was that really so bad? I've personally had a lot of fun seeing how few points I can beat Thug Life with while playing against the Squadron Benchmark AI. It can be a great way to practice range manipulation and arc dodging.

I'd hate playing it if I were flying, say, 4 B-wings, but most lists these days have a fair chance against it.

41 minutes ago, Astech said:

Was that really so bad? I've personally had a lot of fun seeing how few points I can beat Thug Life with while playing against the Squadron Benchmark AI. It can be a great way to practice range manipulation and arc dodging.

I'd hate playing it if I were flying, say, 4 B-wings, but most lists these days have a fair chance against it.

Well, you're saying these days, I thought we were looking at past waves and not how the meta would fare nowadays?