I think it's a pity, but I'm not one to put my money where my mouth is on this. I really do like the idea of epic, but huge ships just don't seem worth their points. When I host an epic tournament I have to say that the players MUST have a huge ship, or else the one dude (who doesn't like huge ships) who shows up with more small ships always wins. (Okay, he's also a very good player, but this makes it more so.)

I also have gotten my capital ships fix through Armada. I hardly play X-Wing any more. I played last night for the first time in many, MANY months.

But I still like the idea of epic, and I was hoping that the C-ROC would have done something to buff all of them. I might have even bought one if I heard that it did. I really play exclusively for the Empire, but I do have the two Rebel huge ships in my collection (gathering dust).

12 hours ago, Vontoothskie said:

Scum go as big as the scale of their operation allows, which is still nothing compared to governments or militaries.

I think it's a mistake to equate the scale of criminal organizations in our present-day world to those in the SWU. The Outer Rim is just the sort of place where ambitious criminal gangs can really set up operations and effectively be governments.

16 hours ago, Vontoothskie said:

if they reissued pilot cards it would be 260+ cards not counting future release. same for cardboard. that gives you an idea of the scale here.

that doesnt fix alot of the games issues too, like the very small number of maneuvers, or the fact that a lot of the game balance is based on likelyhood to hit and damage being a single stat when they should be seperate.

i suppose you could reissue cardboard and pilot cards, with a 5th stat, etc.

but what do you do when the K-wing beomes a medium sized ship and the Ghost is an XL?

i think the only possibilities are that they sell entirely new expansions for a new and seperate game, or they errata squad point and abilities total dramatically and post those new totals in an app.

no way FFG is sending us all 5 lbs shoeboxs full of new components for free

My arguement would be that they almost certainly wouldn't bother making the K-wing medium and the Ghost XL - yes, it is theoretically possible, but having a base size that is not measurable in whole values of templates would require enngineering, essentially, almost a whole new game.

And this conservatism may include not bothering to add a fifth stat, too, so they need only relase pilot cards for stuff they've changed. Think of it as a new balance pass, then, not as a whole new ruleset with a wishlist of 'major changes'. The game is still selling like hotcakes, remember - if they wanted to fix the balance stuff, they'd almost certainly do it with a light touch, instead of something that invalidates everyones' collections entirely.

It's how they did Descent 2.0, and that one was done very deliberately indeed to leave the old expansion packs still usable. I'd expect the desire to not invalidate stocks would be very similar here, and a spit-and-polish pass is much more likely to get things right than an attempt to completely re-engineer the ruleset from the ground up; remember that the more things change, the more we get back to first-attempt-balancing all over again, and y'know, that was what caused half our problems with ships to begin with!

2 hours ago, Mikael Hasselstein said:

But I still like the idea of epic, and I was hoping that the C-ROC would have done something to buff all of them . I might have even bought one if I heard that it did. I really play exclusively for the Empire, but I do have the two Rebel huge ships in my collection (gathering dust).

It did. But that's exactly the far bigger problem here. No new Huge on the horizon means all the other ships of the same ilk are in limbo as well. There will be no design improvements for any of it.

1 hour ago, Reiver said:

My arguement would be that they almost certainly wouldn't bother making the K-wing medium and the Ghost XL - yes, it is theoretically possible, but having a base size that is not measurable in whole values of templates would require enngineering, essentially, almost a whole new game.

And this conservatism may include not bothering to add a fifth stat, too, so they need only relase pilot cards for stuff they've changed. Think of it as a new balance pass, then, not as a whole new ruleset with a wishlist of 'major changes'. The game is still selling like hotcakes, remember - if they wanted to fix the balance stuff, they'd almost certainly do it with a light touch, instead of something that invalidates everyones' collections entirely.

Yeah, anything like a 5th stat makes 2.0 a new game. I highly doubt they would go card-by-card over the whole game in the first place; maybe something like 50% of it would see a spit-and-polish. And would add bigger rule changes like "PWT -1 Attack out of arc" or other new mechanics.

7 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

Yeah, anything like a 5th stat makes 2.0 a new game. I highly doubt they would go card-by-card over the whole game in the first place; maybe something like 50% of it would see a spit-and-polish. And would add bigger rule changes like "PWT -1 Attack out of arc" or other new mechanics.

If so, then the game will continue to careen from crisis to crisis (in competitive mode). It's the foundation of the game (e.g., no keywords, poor granularity, inconsistent rules templating, disproportionate benefits of high PS repositioning, and on and on) that makes it oscillate back and forth at the high levels.

They need to lay a better foundation. X-Wing 1.0 was not built for where the game has developed, in terms of popularity and competitive play.

2 hours ago, Jeff Wilder said:

If so, then the game will continue to careen from crisis to crisis (in competitive mode). It's the foundation of the game (e.g., no keywords, poor granularity, inconsistent rules templating, disproportionate benefits of high PS repositioning, and on and on) that makes it oscillate back and forth at the high levels.

They need to lay a better foundation. X-Wing 1.0 was not built for where the game has developed, in terms of popularity and competitive play.

*sigh* I don't know if anything will help competitive play. Nothing can every be so iron clad that several tens of thousands of people hitting it with a hammer for months at a time can't find the clinks in the armor. The gene pool is too small. It's not a game like Magic with thousands of cards and millions of permutations. Also, you need to make 60 choices to build a deck. You can trick out ships with more stats and more granularity, but ultimately, N < 4 ships in the competitive genome.

The game is amazing--when you are not trying to break it. And that is the goal of competitive play. (Not literally, but the effect is the same.)

OTOH, I am all with you that Keywords and rethinking "the value of X mechanic" is sorely needed.

Edit: This is one reason I think that Prequel ships, with the addition of 2 new factions to support them , would be very good for the game. More diversity, with increased internal faction-based balancing by limiting certain upgrade mechanics to one faction (think astromechs for Rebels, illicits for Scum, and Tech slots for FO/Resistance), would help future design and development from breaking the game. To use Magic as an example again, a White Spell has to only be not broken for White , not for the game as a whole.

56 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

from crisis to crisis

Made me think of Hamilton...one of my other obsessions

11 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

The game is amazing--when you are not trying to break it. And that is the goal of competitive play. (Not literally, but the effect is the same.)

Campaign play and expanded tournament formats/missions might help.

1 hour ago, GrimmyV said:

Campaign play and expanded tournament formats/missions might help.

Yeah, too bad we've just been told "no future scum epic planned." It's kinda the same as saying "it's 100/6 only, folks," since we were also told within the last year "we don't have the time to develop a campaign."

No Epic? No Campaigns? No Prequels?

I gotta bad feeling about this.

Why wait for something they’ve said will never happen? I make my own campaigns.

Scarif:

https://imgur.com/a/UeIoj

Felucia (ground/air WIP):

https://imgur.com/a/k4bgv

Asteroid base (WIP):

https://imgur.com/a/X0G9P

Yuuzhan Vong:

https://imgur.com/a/gibqh

https://imgur.com/a/gC4ih

4 hours ago, Jeff Wilder said:

If so, then the game will continue to careen from crisis to crisis (in competitive mode). It's the foundation of the game (e.g., no keywords, poor granularity, inconsistent rules templating, disproportionate benefits of high PS repositioning, and on and on) that makes it oscillate back and forth at the high levels.

They need to lay a better foundation. X-Wing 1.0 was not built for where the game has developed, in terms of popularity and competitive play.

Actually, I think the issues with competitive x-wing have less to do with the foundation of x-wing and more with the design team and methodology (not believing in math, closed playtest groups that the designers might not always listen to etc.).

Even if you do a full 2.0 reboot, as long as nothing changes in the way stuff it's designed, OP ships/cards will 'slip through' just as often as they do now, so I'm pretty sure it's only a matter of time until we're back to the current situation.

2 hours ago, LordBlades said:

Actually, I think the issues with competitive x-wing have less to do with the foundation of x-wing and more with the design team and methodology (not believing in math, closed playtest groups that the designers might not always listen to etc.).

Even if you do a full 2.0 reboot, as long as nothing changes in the way stuff it's designed, OP ships/cards will 'slip through' just as often as they do now, so I'm pretty sure it's only a matter of time until we're back to the current situation.

I remember Alex hinting at a big change to the playtesting process in his last interview (right before the 'Genius' 'Trajectory Simulator' nerf), possibly doing more open play testing.

I agree with Jeff that a 2.0 would need to incorporate some of the lessons that they have learned from X-wing (and applied to Armada and Legion) such as keywords, attack and defense modification abilities and better rules formatting in general. I think all of the cardboard bases are fine, they mainly need to fix cards (pricing, wording and keywords).

On 3/16/2018 at 3:47 PM, Darth Meanie said:

Yeah, too bad we've just been told "no future scum epic planned." It's kinda the same as saying "it's 100/6 only, folks," since we were also told within the last year "we don't have the time to develop a campaign."

No Epic? No Campaigns? No Prequels?

I gotta bad feeling about this.

One gets the feeling they're raking in the money, and with the new movie cycle they're having to crank out content faster than ever, but FFG has been really reluctant to expand the team and the franchise to suit.

It kind of makes sense from a corporate perspective - FFG is used to managing /many/ games, often quite popular ones, at a time, and they prefer to have their fingers in lots of pies instead of risking too much on a single venture - but when you've had such a massive breakout success, you'd hope they'd recognize that maybe it's time to expand that department a bit, see if they can't push it even further...

... Then again, as long as it keeps selling like hotcakes, maybe they simply don't need to. Irony, eh?

****!

I missed this announcement. I'm not sure how I feel about the game anymore... I got into X-wing for Epic play. I only stayed because of the hope there was a giant ship coming for Scum.

edit: D A M N