What you describe isn't a need for competitive "win-at-all-cost" power players. It is a need for competent testers. It is true that power players can make for great testers when it comes to finding edge-cases and breaking the rules. As an added bonus, they even work for free if you rely on community feedback instead of hiring professionals. The main downside of relying on them to do your testing is that they are absolutly terrible at testing every other aspect of the game, to the point they will give absolutly terrible feedback on other aspects. And without usefull feedback (or even with harmfull feedback) on the other aspects of the game, the game eventually becomes more and more geared towards power players, until eventually it kind of sucks for everyone else.
I don't hate power gamers I just don't enjoy playing against them. I do hate how GW caters to the power games almost exclusively and is gradually turning 40k into chess.
Creating robust rules that capture the uniqueness of not just each faction but sub-faction is a daunting task. It's the scope of the game & the fluff itself that created the rules which often led to imbalances (imbalances generally not noticed by groups who play casually because we don't spam units - maybe playing with 1 - 2 each). GWs response, in appeasing the competitive scene, is how we've gotten 10th edition. Personally, it's a garbage edition that I simply don't play. I won't doubt it if each edition after, they continue to simplify & strip until everyone is nearly playing carbon copies of one another. That's actually the way you get true "competition." I've always heard people grumble about GW and how one page rules blah, blah, blah. Well, when I play my Necrons, CSM or Sisters, I want each of them to really capture the essence of those armies on the table, Imbalances be damned. Give me more, not less. 10th is how you got an edition without the psychic phase.
I believe the problem is not that somebody is a tournament player or a casual player. The problem is when people don't talk with each other before a game. I'm a tournament player that goes with the most disgusting cheese lists ever created by competitive players twisted minds. The kicker is I only use those lists at a tournament, where everyone is expected to push the limits. When I go to a local club for a random game or I meet with friends I always ask what somebody is running, whether its a meta list or casual/fun/narrative list. If someone tells me that he is running a fluiff list, I will tone down or take units I havent used in a while. The disappointment in fluff vs competitive players run both ways. Fluff players are frustrated that their perfectly depicted 6th Imperial Fist Company is being squashed like bugs by a bullgryn charging imperial guard while being mowed down by manticores and competitive players are being frustrated that they wanted to have some challenge with their MSU Eldar list and someone brings Chaos Knight list with 3 bigs knights which basically lets Eldar player win without even shooting back. We should stop being toxic toward each other and just talk. Talk what type of game you want to play. Don't be angry that if you go to a tournament people are running meta lists and don't be disapppointed when people say that its a not a fluff list when you appear to a narrative / campaign event. It's the same in other sports. A pro cyclists will not have a good time going on a casual ride with their friends on his ultra carbon 6kg bike and a guy riding a fat bike will not have fun at the cycling gathering for competitive riders. Competitive players push the companies to realease new models and update the game to keep it fresh, while casual players keep the hobby alive while giving a reason for a company to keep releasing certain model which is neat but its rules are kinda meh. Maybe in the next edition this model will be an autoinclude, who knows (look at Kasrkin example). Both type of players are good. Both are needed. But we both agree on one thing - Erebus is a dick.
I completely agree with you, and it sounds like you are not a power gamer, just a competitive which are 2 different things. Sounds like you are an asset to the community with that outlook.
@@LetsTalkTabletop well all competitive players are power gamers :). But yeah, coming with a cheese list to a fun game night is kinda pointless and to be honest rude. Narrative games are not supposed to be balanced, they are all about downing a shot of whisky and shouting FOR KRIEG while rolling 10 inch charge with kriegers against angron :)
As someone who sits somewhere in the middle of this - I have no interest in tournaments, I like historical games and scenario play, but want to think through my moves and play well - I find this attitude from casual players to be *extremely* toxic. It's really gross to call people who want to play a game well "win at all costs" and accuse them of "ruining the game." They're the only ones engaging with the game. If you're there for beer and pretzels then drink your beer and eat your pretzels but don't give other people shit for actually engaging with and playing the game. A lot of games have issues with the design not withstanding being picked at or optimized to. That's one of the reasons I like scenario play: you can't solve a game that changes every week. But if it can't, that's an issue of design, and is the responsibility of the designer to fix. Players should be trying to make smart decisions, that's all a game is: a series of interesting decisions.
its bad when the company starts to adapt the system of how they make their games and how they model their products and how much of a item they make for sales based on the "feeding frenzy" template. GW went over to that and a "no dusty boxes on the shelf" (which is to say only make what will sell fast and dont worry about making more unless THAT batch will sell fast) idea years ago to maximize shareholder profits and i think its the cancer that will eventually kill the company as it is now...
I have to disagree on this one, we should be very afraid to wake up one day and our favourite game has become a sport, statistics and tier lists. I'm not really into cricket or bowls, a money making gold mine for a company but boring and bland for every player I have spoken to since 1993.
In most cases, it already has. I agree with you that the competitive people typically ruin everything, lol. But they have been in this hobby for decades already. This isn't anything new. But their presence does have its upsides.
This whole discussion is bizarre to me. We would never use the term “win it all cost” for someone who plays chess. Someone who studies chess openings, isn’t meta chasing or netdecking. They’re playing chess. Theres no such thing as min-maxing chess. Chess hobbyists can paint their pieces or 3-D printing them. You can also probably even tell a good narrative story using a chess board. But at the end of the day they are both miniature wargames with a winner and loser. Without that foundation you’re just setting up dioramas.
Your take on this is kind of bizarre to me as well. I can't say you're wrong, but it is very odd. You also couldn't say that you played a narrative game of chess. Sure, you could say that your night charged in and killed a pawn, but obviously there's no real narrative to that. No character. No role play. Chess is not designed to be anything other than competitive. That would be like having a narrative game of poker. It just doesn't make any sense because there is no room for friendly narrative in that.
@@LetsTalkTabletop its the mind set. your a competitive player or narrative player. A competitive player will study and learn the ins and outs to be better. your narrative player wants to tell a good story. though i have never met a narrative player who did not play to win.
There's no min-maxing in chess because there is no opportunity for creative self-expression that affects gameplay and no choices to make before the game starts. Chess is a perfectly balanced game that appeals to some people and is boring to others. Chess is not the ideal end-point for tabletop wargames like 40k. 40k is not, and absolutely should not be, perfectly balanced like chess is because playing the game is only half the experience. The other half is creative self-expression; assembling and painting your army, and then writing an army list. A competitive player's only real option for self-expression in 40k is what color to paint their models, because the Games Workshop rules team tells them exactly what models to buy and play in a list.
Totally disagree. The more you design a game for competitive play, i.e. the more ‘balanced’ it is, the more variance and interest you have to reduce. Chess being on the competitive end of the spectrum, it has no variance. Each player has a set army list and a set deployment. You don’t get to customize anything. You don’t get to swap out a rook for another castle or have 2 queens at the cost of all your pawns. The more choices and options you throw into a game, the further you push something toward more of a role playing game where players choose all kinds of stuff that defines their character or their army, the harder it gets to balance. I’m not saying 40k is a well designed game. In fact I think it’s pretty awful, but not because it’s unbalanced. It used to be a LOT more unbalanced in earlier editions, but interestingly enough, earlier editions gave you way more options, both in your lists and in what you could do on the tabletop. To the point where if you go far enough back, it was basically a role playing game with a GM. So that’s the problem. You want a ‘balanced’ competitive game? Play a game that’s built for it. Magic The Gathering. Warhammer Underworlds. Games that limit everyone’s choices so that everyone has an even playing field. But don’t bring your competitive mindset into something like Necromunda or D&D because it was never designed for it. It sacrificed the balance to give players options to express themselves and be creative. The real problem is the competitive gamers who can’t actually hack it competitively who come over to more narrative games hoping for some easy wins. Those people need to take a long hard look at themselves and ask what got them to that point in life.
I really don't like the arguments presented here. First, you say power-gamers are necessary to find and fix problems that fluff players would never run into. But if the fluff players never run into them, then why are they a problem in the first place? Second, you say power-gamers "keep the lights on" because they buy more models than fluff players, which makes more sense but without any data to back it up, I could just as easily argue that fluff players are the ones spending most of the money, because they will just need to have all the models, even the ones that aren't any good in the rules. More importantly though, this entire argument starts with the unspoken premise that power-gamers need to justify their existence in the game. I mean imagine a power-gamer complaining about fluff players who don't know how to play well and who make the game worse by playing badly. Would you feel better if they then turned around and said, "Well we need fluff players though because they catch plot holes and they spend a lot of money on obscure models and fancy paints and such!" The reality is that there isn't a clear line between "power gamers" and "fluff gamers". If you don't like playing against someone because they try to lawyer every rule that comes up to eke out an unfair advantage, that's not a power games, that's just a jerk. If you don't like playing against someone because they take forever to carefully consider their turn and where to place each individual model, that's not a power gamer, that's a slow player. If you don't like playing against someone because they run a list that you think is boring, that's not a power gamer, that's someone with different tastes from you. And if you don't like playing against someone because they always beat you, that might be a power gamer, but now you're just a sore loser. There are many many examples of players bringing "fluffy" or "meme" lists to tournaments that are absolutely not the standard meta-mandated net list and doing well, because a good player is worth far more than a good list. Power vs fluff is a false choice, you can have both.
Fluff and Power gamers are certainly a spectrum. So using the power gamers to fix bugs is useful to balance the game and remove exploits. I think power gamers (being people who only care about winning and use the cheesiest, most meta netlist they can in order to win without any regard to the other player's fun) are bad for the community. There are a lot of people who agree with me. I would be fine if Power gamers claimed my group was a negative, their opinion doesn't hurt me. I would disagree, but probably wouldn't even comment or do anything other than scroll on by shaking my head. Their opinion is their own. We really shouldn't confuse Power gamer with competitive.
its competitive or narrative. not power gamer. if you give me a rule set and i build my army/forces or even character to be as optimised as possible and it breaks your game. then you designed a bad rule set. I can give you a narrative game no matter what we are playing. its just creating the back stories and any special rules to carry the game into a campaign play style. In the narrative games i am more likely to build my list/character to work within the story. but when i am playing with strangers or in a tournament. I am gonna put my best foot forward and optimise my game. especially if i am pay. but in the end its a mind set.
Even if a person DID believe competitive players make the game worse, there are only two ways to reduce the amount of them: 1. Either homogenize the game to the point that there are no clearly good or bad choices, or 2. Introduce so much luck and randomness to the game that skill and planning have a very modest effect on the game. If you don't like either of these changes, you're more competitive than you think you are, you just dont like getting outclassed by more tactical or more meta players. My main issue is how difficult it is to flexibly react to the game's meta when adding new units or new armies to your collection to try is both nonsensically expensive and time intensive. Which is why all my armies are made of carefully measured cardstock print-outs instead of GW plastic.
Haha! That's one way to stay within your budget. And the homogenized aspect you mentioned, would be a very well-balanced game. That's the sort of thing I aim for in my games.
What you describe isn't a need for competitive "win-at-all-cost" power players. It is a need for competent testers. It is true that power players can make for great testers when it comes to finding edge-cases and breaking the rules. As an added bonus, they even work for free if you rely on community feedback instead of hiring professionals.
The main downside of relying on them to do your testing is that they are absolutly terrible at testing every other aspect of the game, to the point they will give absolutly terrible feedback on other aspects. And without usefull feedback (or even with harmfull feedback) on the other aspects of the game, the game eventually becomes more and more geared towards power players, until eventually it kind of sucks for everyone else.
I don't hate power gamers I just don't enjoy playing against them. I do hate how GW caters to the power games almost exclusively and is gradually turning 40k into chess.
Creating robust rules that capture the uniqueness of not just each faction but sub-faction is a daunting task. It's the scope of the game & the fluff itself that created the rules which often led to imbalances (imbalances generally not noticed by groups who play casually because we don't spam units - maybe playing with 1 - 2 each). GWs response, in appeasing the competitive scene, is how we've gotten 10th edition. Personally, it's a garbage edition that I simply don't play. I won't doubt it if each edition after, they continue to simplify & strip until everyone is nearly playing carbon copies of one another. That's actually the way you get true "competition."
I've always heard people grumble about GW and how one page rules blah, blah, blah. Well, when I play my Necrons, CSM or Sisters, I want each of them to really capture the essence of those armies on the table, Imbalances be damned. Give me more, not less. 10th is how you got an edition without the psychic phase.
I believe the problem is not that somebody is a tournament player or a casual player. The problem is when people don't talk with each other before a game. I'm a tournament player that goes with the most disgusting cheese lists ever created by competitive players twisted minds. The kicker is I only use those lists at a tournament, where everyone is expected to push the limits. When I go to a local club for a random game or I meet with friends I always ask what somebody is running, whether its a meta list or casual/fun/narrative list. If someone tells me that he is running a fluiff list, I will tone down or take units I havent used in a while. The disappointment in fluff vs competitive players run both ways. Fluff players are frustrated that their perfectly depicted 6th Imperial Fist Company is being squashed like bugs by a bullgryn charging imperial guard while being mowed down by manticores and competitive players are being frustrated that they wanted to have some challenge with their MSU Eldar list and someone brings Chaos Knight list with 3 bigs knights which basically lets Eldar player win without even shooting back.
We should stop being toxic toward each other and just talk. Talk what type of game you want to play. Don't be angry that if you go to a tournament people are running meta lists and don't be disapppointed when people say that its a not a fluff list when you appear to a narrative / campaign event.
It's the same in other sports. A pro cyclists will not have a good time going on a casual ride with their friends on his ultra carbon 6kg bike and a guy riding a fat bike will not have fun at the cycling gathering for competitive riders.
Competitive players push the companies to realease new models and update the game to keep it fresh, while casual players keep the hobby alive while giving a reason for a company to keep releasing certain model which is neat but its rules are kinda meh. Maybe in the next edition this model will be an autoinclude, who knows (look at Kasrkin example). Both type of players are good. Both are needed. But we both agree on one thing - Erebus is a dick.
I completely agree with you, and it sounds like you are not a power gamer, just a competitive which are 2 different things. Sounds like you are an asset to the community with that outlook.
@@LetsTalkTabletop well all competitive players are power gamers :). But yeah, coming with a cheese list to a fun game night is kinda pointless and to be honest rude. Narrative games are not supposed to be balanced, they are all about downing a shot of whisky and shouting FOR KRIEG while rolling 10 inch charge with kriegers against angron :)
As someone who sits somewhere in the middle of this - I have no interest in tournaments, I like historical games and scenario play, but want to think through my moves and play well - I find this attitude from casual players to be *extremely* toxic.
It's really gross to call people who want to play a game well "win at all costs" and accuse them of "ruining the game."
They're the only ones engaging with the game. If you're there for beer and pretzels then drink your beer and eat your pretzels but don't give other people shit for actually engaging with and playing the game.
A lot of games have issues with the design not withstanding being picked at or optimized to. That's one of the reasons I like scenario play: you can't solve a game that changes every week. But if it can't, that's an issue of design, and is the responsibility of the designer to fix. Players should be trying to make smart decisions, that's all a game is: a series of interesting decisions.
its bad when the company starts to adapt the system of how they make their games and how they model their products and how much of a item they make for sales based on the "feeding frenzy" template. GW went over to that and a "no dusty boxes on the shelf" (which is to say only make what will sell fast and dont worry about making more unless THAT batch will sell fast) idea years ago to maximize shareholder profits and i think its the cancer that will eventually kill the company as it is now...
Always great to see your views on it, definitely feel a lot of same
Thanks for saying that! 😃
I have to disagree on this one, we should be very afraid to wake up one day and our favourite game has become a sport, statistics and tier lists. I'm not really into cricket or bowls, a money making gold mine for a company but boring and bland for every player I have spoken to since 1993.
In most cases, it already has. I agree with you that the competitive people typically ruin everything, lol. But they have been in this hobby for decades already. This isn't anything new. But their presence does have its upsides.
@@LetsTalkTabletop They are few, we are many... our number is Legion!
This whole discussion is bizarre to me. We would never use the term “win it all cost” for someone who plays chess. Someone who studies chess openings, isn’t meta chasing or netdecking. They’re playing chess. Theres no such thing as min-maxing chess.
Chess hobbyists can paint their pieces or 3-D printing them. You can also probably even tell a good narrative story using a chess board.
But at the end of the day they are both miniature wargames with a winner and loser. Without that foundation you’re just setting up dioramas.
Your take on this is kind of bizarre to me as well. I can't say you're wrong, but it is very odd. You also couldn't say that you played a narrative game of chess. Sure, you could say that your night charged in and killed a pawn, but obviously there's no real narrative to that. No character. No role play. Chess is not designed to be anything other than competitive. That would be like having a narrative game of poker. It just doesn't make any sense because there is no room for friendly narrative in that.
@@LetsTalkTabletop its the mind set. your a competitive player or narrative player. A competitive player will study and learn the ins and outs to be better. your narrative player wants to tell a good story. though i have never met a narrative player who did not play to win.
There's no min-maxing in chess because there is no opportunity for creative self-expression that affects gameplay and no choices to make before the game starts. Chess is a perfectly balanced game that appeals to some people and is boring to others.
Chess is not the ideal end-point for tabletop wargames like 40k. 40k is not, and absolutely should not be, perfectly balanced like chess is because playing the game is only half the experience. The other half is creative self-expression; assembling and painting your army, and then writing an army list. A competitive player's only real option for self-expression in 40k is what color to paint their models, because the Games Workshop rules team tells them exactly what models to buy and play in a list.
If "power gamers" are a problem then your game is probably not well designed.
That's 100% true. I'm looking at you, Warhammer.
Totally disagree. The more you design a game for competitive play, i.e. the more ‘balanced’ it is, the more variance and interest you have to reduce. Chess being on the competitive end of the spectrum, it has no variance. Each player has a set army list and a set deployment. You don’t get to customize anything. You don’t get to swap out a rook for another castle or have 2 queens at the cost of all your pawns.
The more choices and options you throw into a game, the further you push something toward more of a role playing game where players choose all kinds of stuff that defines their character or their army, the harder it gets to balance.
I’m not saying 40k is a well designed game. In fact I think it’s pretty awful, but not because it’s unbalanced. It used to be a LOT more unbalanced in earlier editions, but interestingly enough, earlier editions gave you way more options, both in your lists and in what you could do on the tabletop. To the point where if you go far enough back, it was basically a role playing game with a GM.
So that’s the problem. You want a ‘balanced’ competitive game? Play a game that’s built for it. Magic The Gathering. Warhammer Underworlds. Games that limit everyone’s choices so that everyone has an even playing field.
But don’t bring your competitive mindset into something like Necromunda or D&D because it was never designed for it. It sacrificed the balance to give players options to express themselves and be creative.
The real problem is the competitive gamers who can’t actually hack it competitively who come over to more narrative games hoping for some easy wins. Those people need to take a long hard look at themselves and ask what got them to that point in life.
I really don't like the arguments presented here. First, you say power-gamers are necessary to find and fix problems that fluff players would never run into. But if the fluff players never run into them, then why are they a problem in the first place? Second, you say power-gamers "keep the lights on" because they buy more models than fluff players, which makes more sense but without any data to back it up, I could just as easily argue that fluff players are the ones spending most of the money, because they will just need to have all the models, even the ones that aren't any good in the rules.
More importantly though, this entire argument starts with the unspoken premise that power-gamers need to justify their existence in the game. I mean imagine a power-gamer complaining about fluff players who don't know how to play well and who make the game worse by playing badly. Would you feel better if they then turned around and said, "Well we need fluff players though because they catch plot holes and they spend a lot of money on obscure models and fancy paints and such!"
The reality is that there isn't a clear line between "power gamers" and "fluff gamers". If you don't like playing against someone because they try to lawyer every rule that comes up to eke out an unfair advantage, that's not a power games, that's just a jerk. If you don't like playing against someone because they take forever to carefully consider their turn and where to place each individual model, that's not a power gamer, that's a slow player. If you don't like playing against someone because they run a list that you think is boring, that's not a power gamer, that's someone with different tastes from you. And if you don't like playing against someone because they always beat you, that might be a power gamer, but now you're just a sore loser.
There are many many examples of players bringing "fluffy" or "meme" lists to tournaments that are absolutely not the standard meta-mandated net list and doing well, because a good player is worth far more than a good list. Power vs fluff is a false choice, you can have both.
Fluff and Power gamers are certainly a spectrum. So using the power gamers to fix bugs is useful to balance the game and remove exploits. I think power gamers (being people who only care about winning and use the cheesiest, most meta netlist they can in order to win without any regard to the other player's fun) are bad for the community. There are a lot of people who agree with me.
I would be fine if Power gamers claimed my group was a negative, their opinion doesn't hurt me. I would disagree, but probably wouldn't even comment or do anything other than scroll on by shaking my head. Their opinion is their own.
We really shouldn't confuse Power gamer with competitive.
Totally understand their place in the hobby. Still have no interest in playing against them.
Haha. Same.
its competitive or narrative. not power gamer. if you give me a rule set and i build my army/forces or even character to be as optimised as possible and it breaks your game. then you designed a bad rule set. I can give you a narrative game no matter what we are playing. its just creating the back stories and any special rules to carry the game into a campaign play style.
In the narrative games i am more likely to build my list/character to work within the story. but when i am playing with strangers or in a tournament. I am gonna put my best foot forward and optimise my game. especially if i am pay. but in the end its a mind set.
Thundercats hoooooooo!
Were you a fan?
Even if a person DID believe competitive players make the game worse, there are only two ways to reduce the amount of them:
1. Either homogenize the game to the point that there are no clearly good or bad choices, or
2. Introduce so much luck and randomness to the game that skill and planning have a very modest effect on the game.
If you don't like either of these changes, you're more competitive than you think you are, you just dont like getting outclassed by more tactical or more meta players.
My main issue is how difficult it is to flexibly react to the game's meta when adding new units or new armies to your collection to try is both nonsensically expensive and time intensive. Which is why all my armies are made of carefully measured cardstock print-outs instead of GW plastic.
Haha! That's one way to stay within your budget. And the homogenized aspect you mentioned, would be a very well-balanced game. That's the sort of thing I aim for in my games.
Absolutely not, catering to this vocal minority ruined 40k