Are tournaments ruining the fun? Nova open winner:

Link?

Another day another chicken little post. I'm sure that list is perfectly fun for the winner, I'm also sure there IS a way to break it, that may not be able to handle other contemporary top tier lists, give it 8 months and if EVERYONE in the competitive scene is playing it then congrats you've created chess, otherwise the meta simply needs to catch up and rantign about how it's unfun is unproductive and boring.

Count Adhemar wrote:

I think we all need to take a deep breath and back away from the personal attacks and inappropriate comments that are pervading this thread. Anymore of these and warnings will be issued. Thank you - Count Adhemar

Sorry, but could you please tell me how I have offended? Because I really and honestly don't know, and I wouldn't want to repeat the same faux pas.

I'm not running around screaming "The sky is falling!" I'm just stating, that what certain people label as "not competitive" simply means "no able to super cheese".

But when you bring those super cheese lists you obviously don't care for fun, fluff or whatever. You just want to maximize your list. Why is it so important to be able to do this with pure dark Eldar? Those lists are fluff abominations anyway, so why do you care? You want cheese? Just play or mix in Eldar. Maybe you can convert them to look dark Eldar y.

@Barking Agatha everyone is bringing 4 Venom squads? Last game I didn't have a single Venom just Raiders. The one before 2 of each for the standard squads and one additional Raider for my Reborn squad.

I completely agree with everything except your position that WAAC players aren't having fun. You can't know what or how they think and thus can't back up that claim. That's why it's a chicken little post your literally ascribing intentions about breaking the game that you can't know they have.

If ALL they find fun about the game is winning, then you might not think they find the game fun but thats not your call to make, and due to the sheer level of variability possible in this game they won't be unstoppable, and if they are they've solved the game and that's admirable, and nothing for them to be faulted for. Games are complex puzzles to be solved. everything else about and above it is simply a layer of abstraction.

Oh. I'm not saying that they don't have fun. Of course they do! I'm saying that winning is top priority to them and that they don't really care about anything else. Winning is fun. Not playing it. Otherwise the lists wouldn't look like that.
So if you so obviously don't care about fluff to just make a winner combination, why do you complain that it's not possible with dark Eldar? That's what I don't get. Those people obviously don't care what they take into battle as long as the general direction is okay (read, the species). So just take Eldar. If you want to, convert them to look dark Eldar y...

CptMetal wrote:

@Barking Agatha everyone is bringing 4 Venom squads? Last game I didn't have a single Venom just Raiders. The one before 2 of each for the standard squads and one additional Raider for my Reborn squad.

You may be right, but that wasn't the point

I did get your point Agatha. It's basically an arms race driven by some gamers that don't care about the actual Game enough but only about the result.

But that doesn't invalidate my point about them whining online and being a very vocal minority.

That Nova winner's list is insane. Rather than wading into the quagmire of whether tournament players are ruining everyone else's fun, I'm much more interested in the question of how, as Dark Eldar, we could even hurt that list. It had a re-rollable Jink save and it was almost certainly Invisible the whole game. And it would destroy anything it touched. Locking it up in CC is not an option because I believe it had Hit and Run. Plus it could split into multiple smaller deathstars. How do you even begin to fight something like that?

We would need massed D weapons to counter that. Or soulfright weaponry that can actually hurt all armies. Like making the void mine actually deadly. Like a one shot super D where +3 is added.

I guess there's a logical disconnect here.

I agree with you: tournament players only want to win. I love tournaments. When I go to them, I want to bring an army with a unique combination of units and abilities that my opponent is unlikely to have encountered before, and to apply them in a way that ensures victory for me. And I don't care if my tournament army matches the exact population numbers of Kabal Snodrass or Craftworld Dweezel. Because a tournament isn't about fluff: it's about winning. It's literally the entire goal.

If we want to start having some kind of fluff competition, where everyone writes up their armies' backstory, and a prize is awarded for the one judged to be the best, that would be great. I'd be all in support of it. But that isn't the case now.

Now, I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that the game isn't balanced, and a set of rules and restrictions are required to make 40k playable in a competitive setting. I don't have an issue with the Decurion, or GMCs. But I'm never going to play in a competitive event again that allows the Gladius to be fielded.

(As a side note, Cptmetal, I've never seen a tournament that would allow the list you posted. Every tournament I'm aware of, including the last ITC event, limits the number of detachments you can field to 2.)

CptMetal wrote:

I did get your point Agatha. It's basically an arms race driven by some gamers that don't care about the actual Game enough but only about the result.

But that doesn't invalidate my point about them whining online and being a very vocal minority.

Sorry, you've misunderstood me.

My point is that I agree with you that I don't like playing games where winning is more important than both players having fun, but I also don't think that either you or I have the right to tell anyone else that our preferred way of playing is 'Right' and theirs is 'Wrong', whether they are a minority or not.

I also didn't say that the arms race was driven by 'some gamers'. I said that it's driven by Games Workshop, because in order to sell new miniatures they make them more powerful than the last ones, and the next ones will be even more powerful, and so on.

I have no way of knowing whether 'they' are very vocal minority or representative of how most people feel, and I doubt that you do either, but it doesn't matter, because even if it were just one person complaining surely they have a right to express their feelings without being told to shut up and stop whining because they are not the 'right' kind of gamer?

No they don't. The only right they have is to have sand kicked in their face and their WAAC list torn apart, because that's what competition means. Competition is fun as all hell regardless of the medium, and losing when you have that mindset makes you better and makes winning even more fun.

What we should be doing right now is figuring out how to do that, rather than discussing the nuances of having fun through winning vs playing to have fun. Narrative, Beer and pretzel, and competitive play are all very different beasts and we ought to start delineating between them.

Jimsolo wrote:

side note, Cptmetal, I've never seen a tournament that would allow the list you posted. Every tournament I'm aware of, including the last ITC event, limits the number of detachments you can field to 2.)

That list was from the Nova open tournament. They do not run the ITC standard, but have different rules. Most importantly to this example the Nova ruleset do not allow gargantuans and have nerfed the D in a different way ( if memory serves ). That list would indeed not be legal in an ITC tournament. Even if it was legal you would not see it there because it would be countered by D or stomps etc.

@CptMetal and everyone
There are many different types of tournaments and most of them have additional rules to balance out the worst of the game breaking combos. Because the base rules are not even remotely written with competetive tournament play in mind. One of these tournament FAQs is the ITC. Because it is written based on votes from the people that play at the tournaments, and it is intended to allow as many people as possible to have fun with as many different builds as possible I think it is pretty swell. It is the closest thing I have seen to a kinda balanced way to play 40K. Some of the ITC tournaments has even been won by Ork lists!
( unfortunately it only nerfs, disalows or balance gamebreakingly OP choices and do not boost weak sauce so pure DE is still out of luck )

The tournament scene is as mentioned here a completely different way to think about the game, and when people start to confuse elements from the tourney aspect with the local/friendly aspect you might get the impression that no fun is able to be had unless you conform to the tourney standards within your friendly games as well. But reality is what you make it. People enjoy 40K for different reasons. ( Read for extra credit ) : https://www.frontlinegaming.org/2015/07/28/why-do-we-play/
Needless to say the people that like going to tourneys probably enjoy the game part more than the lore or modeling part, and might not even feel any regret over having to change faction in order to stay ahead after a particularly powerful codex has been released. I also believe that skill plays a very big part in who takes home the trophies in many of the tournaments, because we see the same people win with different armies. And also if everyone is taking similar OP lists, like say two players with battle companies, then the one is not more OP than the other.
A big part of the fun for tournament players is probably creating the optimal army list. As it is for casual players, but the criteria for what is a good list is different depending on which mindset or what tournament you are building for. For instance for the Nova tournament you probably would want to build the best death star in order to reach the top. It then follows that there are people sitting all over the world actively trying to find the best combination of army and allies possible in order to beat all other lists in a TAC tourney setting, and not a single one has been able to find one for pure DE.

Personally I don't think it is fair to demand that DE should be able to be competitive in tournaments, based on the way the creators of the game has stated that they intend the game to be played. That being said I think it is a shame that GW does not cater to the tournament crowd. But since they don't, i believe it could be up to the community to fix the broken armies. Just like they nerf the OP they might boost the UP.
But that's just like... my opinion man.

Well said.

Massaen wrote:

Link?

Last report, bottom of page 1

http://www.thedarkcity.net/t12655-dark-eldar-versus-the-universe-at-the-atc-tournament

I have played several times against lists like the one in first post with my DE. Some of those games even with pure DE lists. Won some, lost some. Pure killpoints mission is not worht playing, but combined Eternal/Maelstrom/killpoints is doable and fun. I can quarantee that that list (in first post) is a disaster if you do not know how to use it. And it struggles a lot against deamons.

i think the most important thing that everyone is missing here is that the problem isn't tournaments. it isn't players making really optimal lists.
its crap game design.
The factions aren't balanced, they're not designed consistently to the same ethos.
External organisations that try to balance things out with comp packs and equivalents just imbalance things in a slightly different manner. Until the game design improves, these problems will always exist.
If you look at better designed games like infinity, you just don't have these problems at all. Tournament lists are pretty much the exact same style of lists that you'd use in a friendly game against your mates because 99% of units in the game are good at a role, well costed and well balanced.
Sorry guys, but that's the problem. 40k itself.
Tournaments will always highlight the ridiculous lengths people can go to to make an optimal list because you don't enter a tournament with the will to come last. you take the best stuff you can to make sure you do as well as you can given your expected opposition and the rules you're playing to.
that's normal behaviour. To "fix" it you need better rules.

There was a good chat on the miniwargaming channel about power creep...and he imbalance. Their conversation suggested that GW writes for the fluff and not for balance. I couldn't help but think about superhero video games and the balance between such as superman vs. Joker. It's fine to have crazy rules that reflect the models and the force BUT the points should be the balancer.

I wonder if some tournament should publish a global points rebalanced sheet. Take the GW stuff by repoint it.

Quote :

Their conversation suggested that GW writes for the fluff and not for balance.

By that metric a Kabalite should have better stats than an Eldar Gardener and DE tech should be more powerful than an imperial camo net - not the other way round.

^ This

Way way off topic but ya

The fluff to crunch relationship is pretty terrible, especially in our book.  Just look at splinter weapons which use electromagnetic pulses to fire "shards of crystal"... and yet can't damage vehicles under any circumstances. Two things:

A) Directed electromagnetic pulses (like say out of a gun barrel) would be extremely damaging to vehicles by them selves, and in fact EMP is the name for the haywire weapons in the tau army.

B) Crystals under stress (like say hitting the side of a metal vehicle at 2300 feet per second), generate high voltage electrical discharges, known as piezoelectricity.  Those probably wouldn't be great for vehicles, or their occupants, or their fuel tanks either.  Crystals striking ceramic in this manner would create even more electricity, as ceramic similarly generates piezoelectricity.

Luckily no one in the 41st millienia depends on ceramics for protection though  

Seriously GW why fire crystals if you aren't going to include the only reason anyone would ever do that?

Then there is that whole "strongest psyker race in the universe, who spend 10,000 years ferociously suppressing psychic ability" thing.  Where we don't actually gain any benefit from that, while armies like the black templar just "decide" to hate psykers (cause we apparently don't?) and therefore get adamantium will.

There's no real rhyme or reason to the fluff/crunch relationship in my opinion.