9 hours ago, Vontoothskie said:

1.0 was better than 2.0.

which sucks cause I wanted a 2.0 badly, but this aint it. P.s. this seems to be majority opinion in real world, but the minority on the boards. Everybody near me switched back to warhammer anyway with killteam

I don't think the Mass Exodus we've seen with 2.0 was because 2.0 was worse than 1.0, but rather because it provided a very neatly delineated opportunity for players to give up X-Wing who were already suffering from fatigue and boredom with the game. A grown adult can only fly tiny toy spaceships around a 3x3 fishbowl for so long, and a lot of players were likely tired of it. But it's hard to jump ship from a game that has brought you so many fond memories and on which you have invested so much money. So you hang around for one more wave... and one more wave... and one more wave...

But then 2.0 Rolls out and now you've got to spend a chunk of change converting everything to keep in the game...plus you've got to learn new rules and there won't be any new ships for most factions for a long time... well that's a really convenient opportunity to bail on a game you've probably already been flirting with the idea of dumping for a long while now.


So I think the loss of players that coincided with 2.0 wouldn't have been any better or any worse even if 2.0 was much better or much worse than it actually is. And I suppose that's my own unpopular opinion.

I honestly think the assertion that there's been a drop in players isn't something any of us on this forum can make. We don't have the full picture, and any drop in players locally is not generalisable.

If anything, x-wing is stillgrowing; the big tournaments are only getting bigger and more numerous, and many communities are reporting increases in player numbers.

I'm honestly not sure it's sustainable though, a lot of the more experienced players locally to me are feeling more and more burnt out, myself included, especially by the conflicting formats.

15 hours ago, Vontoothskie said:

1.0 was better than 2.0.

which sucks cause I wanted a 2.0 badly, but this aint it.

I am beginning to miss the discontent that was the end of 1.0. . .it was making players very creative in addressing the situation.

I was doing some XWM organization this weekend, and ran into my printout of this:

Players were putting a lot of energy into "reinventing" XWM, getting out of the grind, and make the game fun. With the advent of 2.0, it seems like everyone is willing to just let FFG fluff out factions without demanding more from the game than Standard.

7 hours ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

I don't think the Mass Exodus we've seen with 2.0 was because 2.0 was worse than 1.0, but rather because it provided a very neatly delineated opportunity for players to give up X-Wing who were already suffering from fatigue and boredom with the game. A grown adult can only fly tiny toy spaceships around a 3x3 fishbowl for so long , and a lot of players were likely tired of it.

Because for me this happened after about 5 games.

2.0 has essentially killed any approach to the game but the fishbowl again--and I think this is the biggest danger that 2.0 faces. At some point, without play-style diversity (missions, scenarios, or well-supported Epic), the game will die because it never became anything different than what it was in August of 2012.

Hyperspace was healthier until Jan 28th pt changes turned it into the current meta of beef, a-wings, and spam in general. The worse offenders of the pre-point changes (4 juke sigmas, Vader on Phantoms, Redline, trajectory sim, barrage rocket bombers, jonus, double mod pro torps, adv. sensors, tugboats, etc.) were all extended. Han gunner and Marauder, as well as SNR stapled to every force user, were Hyperspace, but that was it. The discount on large base ships means nothing if there is little board space to run about. Yes, that requires good area control on the part of the spam player, but the burden of execution to setup that area control has become very low for the spammer.

That and spammer v spammer matchups feel bad when your spam is slightly less efficient than your opponent's. The low mobility doesn't allow for the sort of counterplay that something fragile like strikers offer. If we want massive naval battles and not nimble dogfights, we would be playing more Armada.

14 minutes ago, player3010587 said:

Hyperspace was healthier until Jan 28th pt changes turned it into the current meta of beef, a-wings, and spam in general. The worse offenders of the pre-point changes (4 juke sigmas, Vader on Phantoms, Redline, trajectory sim, barrage rocket bombers, jonus, double mod pro torps, adv. sensors, tugboats, etc.) were all extended. Han gunner and Marauder, as well as SNR stapled to every force user, were Hyperspace, but that was it. The discount on large base ships means nothing if there is little board space to run about. Yes, that requires good area control on the part of the spam player, but the burden of execution to setup that area control has become very low for the spammer.

That and spammer v spammer matchups feel bad when your spam is slightly less efficient than your opponent's. The low mobility doesn't allow for the sort of counterplay that something fragile like strikers offer. If we want massive naval battles and not nimble dogfights, we would be playing more Armada.

You're in for a rude awakening if you want spam to go away....

5 minutes ago, RStan said:

You're in for a rude awakening if you want spam to go away....

That, by design is spam. It's a good spam, like a classic TIE Swarm! But Y-wings (which have about the same durability as TIE fighters) are obscenely cheap considering the extra value they give compared to most TIE swarms. The same argument could be made about how the poor Rz-1 is completely left in the dust by the laughably comparably-priced Rz-2. And we haven't even begun to mention B-wings in junction with Leia.

Tragedy Sim also forces the droids to make a careful approach. It is an irrelevant extra shield taken away from most forms of spam that people are unhappy with.

On 3/6/2019 at 1:24 PM, Kieransi said:

What opinions do you have that you don't think many other people share? I'll start:

TIE Silencers are actually good

Recoil is my current top ship... so i really find myself agreeing with you. (and i really like the generics... not so key on kylo, just to many points for him)

as for unpopular opinions:
1. Wedge is garbage

22 hours ago, drjkel said:

I'm not kidding at all. All the new charge/force tokens and the abilities that rely on them mean there's a whole lot more to track. All those tokens in play, plus the fact that old ones are now reasonable to use means there's a whole lot of effects to be aware of that were non issues before. My 9 year old had no issues understanding 1.0 lists, even when he started at 6 (and tournaments shortly after), but he just gave up trying to understand 2.0, there's too much to track on the board that is not picking your dials.

I mean, this is the "unpopular opinions" thread.

All of the "once per turn" effects are now tracked by charge tokens. Plus there are charges that recharge on conditionals, or don't recharge at all. And we have force tokens, that recharge.

The charge token may seem like they simplify the system of remembering "once per turn" effects, but they've opened up the game space for more things to track, which increased complexity.

29 minutes ago, Icelom said:

Recoil is my current top ship... so i really find myself agreeing with you. (and i really like the generics... not so key on kylo, just to many points for him)
 
as for unpopular opinions:
1. Wedge is garbage

Recoil, huh? What are you flying him with? I haven't seen any Silencers except Kylo, Blackout, and the generics

5 minutes ago, Kieransi said:

Recoil, huh? What are you flying him with? I haven't seen any Silencers except Kylo, Blackout, and the generics

This is my list its doing very well for me, (went 3-1 in my last tournament only lost to first place finisher) and i think is 7-2 for all my games played.

TIE/sf Fighter - •“Backdraft” - 57
•“Backdraft” - Fiery Fanatic (41)
Fanatical (2)
Special Forces Gunner (10)
Advanced Optics (4)

TIE/vn Silencer - •“Recoil” - 66
•“Recoil” - Quantity Over Quality (59)
Predator (2)
Pattern Analyzer (5)

Upsilon -class Shuttle - •Lieutenant Tavson - 77
•Lieutenant Tavson - Obedient Shuttle Pilot (62)
Advanced Sensors (10)
•Captain Phasma (5)

Total: 200/200

View in the X-Wing Squad Builder

Hyperspace legal.

Recoil is a beast mode, in any list i have used him in... so **** good.

7 hours ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

But then 2.0 Rolls out and now you've got to spend a chunk of change converting everything to keep in the game...plus you've got to learn new rules and there won't be any new ships for most factions for a long time... well that's a really convenient opportunity to bail on a game you've probably already been flirting with the idea of dumping for a long while now

Yeah, once 2E was announced, there was a period of a few months where locally it died off due to people waiting for the new edition. Well, once you stop going to games for a few months, its not hard to just not start again , and keep on with whatever other hobby you picked up on in the meantime.

On 3/11/2019 at 5:06 AM, Vontoothskie said:

1.0 was better than 2.0.

which sucks cause I wanted a 2.0 badly, but this aint it. P.s. this seems to be majority opinion in real world, but the minority on the boards. Everybody near me switched back to warhammer anyway with killteam

Kill Team was completely dead on arrival here. I tried to get it going at a FLGS and failed miserably, and even the local GW shop basically gave up. Both X-Wing, 40k and AoS are thriving though.

Unpopular opinions:

5Ys in Hyperspace are not as good as people think they are.

4Y double-tap ions are neither overpowered nor underpowered, but are fine because the dial is awful, the shots are frequently unmodded, and it's relatively easy to put damage on them. Y-Wings are also very weak against aces.

The current meta is essentially a tripod of archetypes: generic swarms (with or without a support Shuttle / Ace), aces, and big ship +2. This meta is fine and healthy, though it does a seem a bit skewed at present towards generic swarms and aces.

To fix that, I would not make large based ships cheaper, but I'd make them more powerful, so you're getting what you pay for.

Also Resistance A-Wings should cost at least 2 points more across the board.

11 minutes ago, knute said:

To fix that, I would not make large based ships cheaper, but I'd make them more powerful, so you're getting what you pay for.

Also Resistance A-Wings should cost at least 2 points more across the board.

How? Errata? I think FFG doesn't like doing errata to fix cards. Wasn't the whole sliding points scale they way to "fix" broken things? Which leads to another of my unpopular opinions:

Being able to change points WILL make FFG lazier with game design and more broken combos will be the result. But FFG will just "fix" the problem by increasing points or removing upgrade slots that should otherwise be there per canon.

I agree with the Resistance A-Wings feeling a bit too cheap. But maybe that is because the Rebel A-Wings are a bit too expensive?

I would say give the large based ships a configuration that allows them to take either an extra crew or an extra Gunner.

I otherwise agree with the remainder of your post.

13 minutes ago, knute said:

I would say give the large based ships a configuration that allows them to take either an extra crew or an extra Gunner.

I otherwise agree with the remainder of your post.

The crit deck will always be working against any attempts to improve large ships. 2.0 crits are much more impactful than 1.0, and large ships tend to have a lot of hull to accumulate those crits.

On 3/9/2019 at 11:03 AM, Dr Moneypants said:

While I think they mean well, the podcasts and prevailing Meta wisdom supresses creativity in list building and the overall game scene.

Strongly disagree. I think the meta discussions get to the most optimum choices sooner, but those optimum choices were already there. If we could somehow prevent people from discussing the meta, it would only slow down the process, and restrict access to knowledge of these meta builds to a smaller pool of players. Better to find the unbalanced elements early so that FFG can (in theory) learn from them. Or, at the very least, make the players aware of powerful lists they may have not encountered.

2 hours ago, knute said:

Also  Resistance  A-Wings should cos  t at least 2 points more across the board. 

The uniques definitively yes, the generics not really (edit: +1 is fine for them!)

The Mozambique is actually better than the p2020

On 3/9/2019 at 1:03 PM, Dr Moneypants said:

While I think they mean well, the podcasts and prevailing Meta wisdom supresses creativity in list building and the overall game scene.

53 minutes ago, Koing907 said:

Strongly disagree. I think the meta discussions get to the most optimum choices sooner , but those optimum choices were already there. If we could somehow prevent people from discussing the meta, it would only slow down the process , and restrict access to knowledge of these meta builds to a smaller pool of players. Better to find the unbalanced elements early so that FFG can (in theory) learn from them. Or, at the very least, make the players aware of powerful lists they may have not encountered.

IMHO, everything you just said is an affirmation of @Dr Moneypants 's position.

The long road to finding optimal choices is what creativity is about, and if an unbalanced element remains undiscovered, then there is no imbalance. The game only becomes imbalanced once someone begins exploiting a bad mechanic.

Solving the puzzle is what listbuilding and play should be about; finding that solution online is not gameplay, it's using "cheat codes."

You're basically saying that more legitimate way to play Hide And Seek is calling out "I'm going to hide in the closet" because you'll be found anyways, you can save the rest of the players a bunch of time, and then FFG can decide if the closet is really the best place to hide.

3 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

IMHO, everything you just said is an affirmation of @Dr Moneypants 's position.

The long road to finding optimal choices is what creativity is about, and if an unbalanced element remains undiscovered, then there is no imbalance. The game only becomes imbalanced once someone begins exploiting a bad mechanic.

Solving the puzzle is what listbuilding and play should be about; finding that solution online is not gameplay, it's using "cheat codes."

You're basically saying that more legitimate way to play Hide And Seek is calling out "I'm going to hide in the closet" because you'll be found anyways, you can save the rest of the players a bunch of time, and then FFG can decide if the closet is really the best place to hide.

Analogies are usually terrible. We're not talking about Hide and Seek, we're talking about X-Wing list building.

The dissemination of a list can be done in many ways. If I play at a tournament, and afterwards copy the winner's list because it's really good, have I used a "cheat code"? If I talk with my buddy at the local game shop, and he says "5 Y's is really good, I saw a person flying it last week..." is that using a "cheat code"? The net simply makes this process quicker and more efficient. The efficiency got a real boost with meta-wing and listjuggler, and I think it was a really good thing for the game, as powerful combos could be disseminated, tested, analyzed and understood on a scale that FFG could never achieve with their playtesters. ****, I daresay that all of the "improvements" in 2nd edition are a direct result of internet meta feedback.

1 hour ago, Koing907 said:

Analogies are usually terrible. We're not talking about Hide and Seek, we're talking about X-Wing list building.

Ah, well, I thought it was pretty good.

Quote

The dissemination of a list can be done in many ways. If I play at a tournament, and afterwards copy the winner's list because it's really good, have I used a "cheat code"? If I talk with my buddy at the local game shop, and he says "5 Y's is really good, I saw a person flying it last week..." is that using a "cheat code"?

"Cheat codes" allow a player to get to the resolution of the game faster, so yeah, I think they fall in the same category.

Quote

The net simply makes this process quicker and more efficient. The efficiency got a real boost with meta-wing and listjuggler, and I think it was a really good thing for the game, as powerful combos could be disseminated, tested, analyzed and understood on a scale that FFG could never achieve with their playtesters. ****, I daresay that all of the "improvements" in 2nd edition are a direct result of internet meta feedback.

@Dr Moneypants wasn't discussing efficiency, he was discussing creativity. And again, it doesn't seem to me that you've refuted his original statement that all of this "efficiency" isn't dumbing down the game's creativity.

I will say this about the current meta. I'm rather tired of seeing roughly the same 5 A-Wing Resistance lists showing up at every local tournament.

I was watching Hairy Nick on YouTube the other day after the "emergency points change" for the Upsilon, and I think he has the right of it when he says that FFG ought to consider doing more frequent points changes - at least once every 4 months instead of 6 months. I think the "new meta" developed rather quickly, and seems durable enough that we might very well see the same lists (5Y/4Y, 5A, etc.) until July.

That brings me back to the above comments. X-Wing shares one very important thing in common with Magic: The Gathering - the ease of access to tournament lists (this, btw, is an immense improvement over the likes of 40k, where it is like the figurative pulling of teeth to get access to the tournament lists). That ease of access permits the meta to establish itself within a matter of weeks instead of months (for the present conversation, I consider the meta essentially fixed since Toronto). But what Magic has over X-Wing is the regularity with which new sets come onto the scene. Since you have a new set coming out every 3 months, the meta doesn't stagnate for long. You have the initial shock of the new set (maybe 2 to 4 weeks), the establishment of a new meta (weeks 5 to 8), and the stagnation of it (weeks 9 to 12), but then you get to re-do the whole process over again relatively quickly.

The same doesn't apply to X-Wing, at least at present. Hopefully FFG will start with more frequent wave releases to fix the problem.

2 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

Right. That was an analogy.

Right. Just like I said in the immediately preceding four words you edited out of my quote. Hide and Go seek has very little in common with X-Wing miniatures, and so your analogy isn't helpful.

2 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

"Cheat codes" allow a player to get to the resolution of the game faster, so yeah, I think they fall in the same category.

Interesting. I don't think I agree, but even if I did, what do you propose to do about it, if anything?

Is taking inspiration from an opponent's list "cheat code" as well? How about learning from their opponent's tactics instead of "inventing" tactics on their own?

2 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

@Dr Moneypants wasn't discussing efficiency, he was discussing creativity. And again, it doesn't seem to me that you've refuted his original statement that all of this "efficiency" isn't dumbing down the game's creativity.

I don't think that the podcasts and meta discussion suppress creativity in the X-Wing scene. I think it does hasten the process of list hegemony.

@Koing907

You don't have to agree with it. That's why it's an unpopular opinion. What I will say is that figuring out those puzzles are one of my favorite parts of X-Wing and why I don't listen to a lot of podcasts. I'm not saying you shouldn't. I just think we'd see a lot more fun if perhaps 'less optimal' lists if people treated podcaster wisdom a little less dogmatically.

All that said, I like that my unpopular opinion inspired such an interesting discussion and I don't think either you or @Darth Meanie are wrong. I think you're just representing different opinions in a debate where there may not be a right or wrong side.