I myself am a fixer, but I also take great pleasure in trying to find ways to make "broken" ships work. I'd love to try out a duel TIE Advanced combo with some filler ships and see what I can make of it. Who knows, I may become the world's leading expert in flying a TIE Advanced.

The point is, it's all well and good to try and fix things, and I applaud those who are able, but there's something to be said for being able to MacGyver your way into a great squad by taking less-than-perfect ships and somehow making them work.

Also what is with the fascination with Lanchester's law? Surely the Salvo Combat model is more appropriate for this game? We are absolutely in a discrete time situation with attack power high relative to number of shots and we have defensive firepower. Try running the algorithms in that situation. I think you might be surprised

Thanks for that link. It was an interesting read. It does seem to be a better fit for describing X-Wing's combat system.

I feel a lot of the forum spam is just how we show love for the game. The game is not quite like Magic: The Gathering where there are literally thousands and thousands of cards and multiple formats to discuss at every moment. We want to stay immersed in something that is fairly static. By this time most people who play a decent amount have had a good chance to try a little bit of everything and don't have that much new stuff to contribute. All the hypothetical forum posts are just a great way to keep talking about the game that we love until something new to talk about gets released.

doesn't help that they take 3 months past bloody forever to release everything…. yeah i said it.

But really, yeah, this game is awesome.

But really, I'm totally for the idea of diverting "fix" topics into "help" topics. You don't spend all this time designing something that's useless. If it seems to be, then it either doesn't fit your play style or you haven't figured out the best way to use something that you still find enjoyable and that works for you. And I really like OPs idea of those help topics being very good for the game and community overall, I totally agree that would happen.

That all being said, I wish their was a way to get an EPT on a shuttle pilot for this one reason: not to break the game, but just think about it. Adrenaline Rush. Picture an Imperial Officer. Straight-backed, british accented, dignity incarnate Imperial officer. Teeth clenched into his bottom lip, eyes bulging, white-knuckle grip on the yolk as if he was pulling a no-holds-barred retina detaching maneuver…. as the shuttle literally just sits there. I DARE YOU NOT TO LAUGH AT LEAST A LITTLE.

a) FFG are not statisticians, the way that most companies handle balancing is they point models so it feels right, then throw it out to playtesting, most of the time this works but things slip through, normally obscure interactions (see MTG).

That's quite an assumption to make. How do you know that they didn't employ a statistician or have employers who have a background and/or interest in statistical analysis?

a) FFG are not statisticians, the way that most companies handle balancing is they point models so it feels right, then throw it out to playtesting, most of the time this works but things slip through, normally obscure interactions (see MTG).

That's quite an assumption to make. How do you know that they didn't employ a statistician or have employers who have a background and/or interest in statistical analysis?

I don't think it's even possible to design a game like this without getting heavily into statistics and probability. Just look at the attack dice vs. the evade dice.

although i do wonder if they know about the Boba Fett/Navigator thing in advance...

although i do wonder if they know about the Boba Fett/Navigator thing in advance...

Given the speed at which they confirmed it, I am inclined to believe they did. One of their reps at gencon answered that question before most players even had wave 3 in their hands

Hey FFG Forum Folks!

I'll start with a rant, and end with a way to fix this that I think will help make us all better players! Maybe it's my "old age" making me a bit crotchety, but I am getting a little tired of all the "How I think we can fix [insert pilot name here]" or "fixing [insert upgrade name here]" posts, and I am curious if I am alone on this or if there are a bunch of people out there who agree.

My take is, FFG spends an inordinate amount of time playtesting every pilot and upgrade they produce. If you don't think FFG is already playtesting Wave 4 and probably even Wave 5 right now, then you don't know a heck of a lot about what goes into making these games. FFG has some of the top players out there use the new ships along with old ones to see how they work together, and put in countless hours making sure nothing is broken, that pilot/upgrade costs are fair, and that nothing is too overpowered. That's just how these kind of games are made, it's true for almost any game like this.

After all of this, a bunch of people playing the game, who have used a pilot/ability once or twice and fared poorly thinks it is broken? Your single-digit hours worth of experience lets you know better than the hundreds of hours that more experienced players have put in? I really doubt that.

That being said, there is an easy way we can fix all of this. If your experience with a pilot or upgrade keeps ending in disappointment, ask your fellow gamers how you can improve on it. Make posts like "I can't seem to hit with Seismic Charges, any tips out there for making these work?" or "The YT-1300 seems overpriced, how can I make the points worth it?" I think we will all be better off without the "Fixing" posts.

Instead of starting a discussion on changing cards that FFG is not going to implement, you might learn a lot about the game and become a better player. Isn't that why we are on these forums to begin with?

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Let me know what you think! (also kudos to anyone who caught the Kubrick reference)

This should be posted in the EotE forums.

As a game designer myself, I find the players that need cards or rules "fixed" are usually the ones that haven't taken the time to figure out what the game designer's intentions were when they came up with the card/rule in question.

When you write a set of rules for any particular game, they are your interpretation of that conflict based on your own judgements. Someone else will have their own preconceived ideas and they may not match yours.

The games I've written, have been interpreted differently from different players and have sometimes changed accordingly. But sometimes, it just needed explanation of 'this is what I intended this rule to do'. Once everyone is on the same page, harmony is restored.

To go out and say FFG have got this card wrong and it needs fixing is showing a lack of understanding of what they were trying to achieve. I have yet to find anything that has made me question their rules or cards. It all seems very balanced and sometimes the good guys win and sometimes they lose. Isn't that what happened in the movies anyway?

At this point, any "fixing" I'd suggest would be a way to hide topics you were not interested in following. Let's not resort to censorship of topics just because some of us can't be bothered to skip them. Especially when the topic actually does relate to the game, misguided or not.

a) FFG are not statisticians, the way that most companies handle balancing is they point models so it feels right, then throw it out to playtesting, most of the time this works but things slip through, normally obscure interactions (see MTG).

That's quite an assumption to make. How do you know that they didn't employ a statistician or have employers who have a background and/or interest in statistical analysis?

All games designers will have a passing knowledge of statistics, but it's generally not how things are done in the industry. People always seem to assume there is a magic formula or game designers spend time going over statistical breakdowns. This really doesn't work in practice. In fact Statistics gets in the way of design. So you design with statistics in mind, but not as your decider.

Most game designers will work on gut feeling, which a lot of the time is close. They will probably discuss between themselves and possibly will include statistical backup for their argument. But generally consensus is where they will start. It will then go out to a playtest group. Where they will then tweak from peoples experience.

After that it will go to production. But things may change when they get to a bigger playtest group in the public.

If this was not the case there would never be ERRATAS... which there definitely are.. Erratas come into play when things are picked up after production.

You may think I'm making assumptions here, but you have no knowledge of my background or who I know. So you are also making assumptions, which may be wrong.

my main problem with "fixing X" threads is mostly the term fixing.

while in some cases the issue at hand might be considered broken, most of the time the suggestion to solve the issue is just a variant/alternative, which might be interesting to play and changes issue X, but doesn't necessarily fix it.

.. ok that might be semantics, but many of the suggestions just fall into the category of house rule which is a worthwhile topic in itself.

so, the difficulty when reading such topics is most of the time to judge if the issue is really broken and if the people arguing towards that do actually know what they are talking about.

while game designers might or might not have just a passing interest in statistics, as mentioned before, forum posters nowadays usually use the term statistics very very lightly.

given the many variables (lists (for both sides), opponents, dice results, game states influencing the applicability of skills/upgrades/weapons, map setup, upgrade<>ship correlations ...) there is virtually no chance of reproducing certain situations by chance. While some features might be judged in different situations with similar local circumstances, it would require to amount quite a few artificially same games to get halfway decent statistics.

That leaves mostly player experience and a certain theoretical feel for how things would play out with minor changes here or there, which probably works quite well for experienced players, but can't be easily reconstructed from reading a post.

So in the end those threads end with everyone offering an opinion and the hope the devs get the right inspiration from the thread, if they read it at all.

edit PS:

meta threads about other kind of threads usually don't work better than the original type

You don't spend all this time designing something that's useless.

Here's the problem though. While the Tie Advanced is far from useless, it's also still inferior to most everything else. But it's only 2 points off from what most people seem to think. That's 2% of your total points... Hardly a massive amount.

But with competitive lists 2% can make the difference between 8th and 1st place at a tournament.

I agree over all with the idea that people shouldn't be looking for a fix for something, they should be looking for help in using it better.

The thread about the YT-1200 being broken and in need of improvement is a good example. No one that I know of thinks that the YT is under powered. So clearly it doesn't need improvement, you do however need to know how to use it.

Or the Lambda Shuttle, when it first came out it was considered pretty much worthless, but you then have people like SableGryphon who figure out how to make it work, and change the worse ship in Wave 3 into the Doomcow.