What is "Competitive Gaming" and Why I Feel 40k Never Has Been

[Path Walker]

Why would you face a "balanced list" in any competitive setting? It would be "power list of any era" vs "another power list of any era". Why are you adamant about meeting non-competitive lists with your hyper-competitive list in an competitive environment?
You will rather see CentStar vs Serpent Spam. Next Round Serpent Spam will face Gravbiker Spam. The chances Serpent Spam will play against an melee imperial guard with Bullgryns and Rough Riders only is pretty slim. So why bother comparing the two armies?
You are basically pointing out that 40k cannot be competitive because a comeptitive list will win over a non-competitive list 9 out of 10 times... which is... odd?

It's not odd to want the inherently imbalanced part of the game, list building, to have less importance on who wins.

The only reason to argue against that is if you rely on netlists to win

[Auticus]

Why would you face a "balanced list" in any competitive setting? It would be "power list of any era" vs "another power list of any era". Why are you adamant about meeting non-competitive lists with your hyper-competitive list in an competitive environment?
You will rather see CentStar vs Serpent Spam. Next Round Serpent Spam will face Gravbiker Spam. The chances Serpent Spam will play against an melee imperial guard with Bullgryns and Rough Riders only is pretty slim. So why bother comparing the two armies?
You are basically pointing out that 40k cannot be competitive because a comeptitive list will win over a non-competitive list 9 out of 10 times... which is... odd?

Not quite. I am not in any way, shape, or form discussing competitive lists winning over non competitive lists. That should be clear to anyone.

I'm saying that the power disparity in the army lists means that there are only a very small amount of legitimate lists that can be played at a tournament with any chance of really winning. That until the army codices are balanced better against each other, that being competitive is for the most part figuring out which one of the three or four lists have a chance, and using that.

That to me is not competitive. That's letting your army list do the work for you. When I was fielding my "competitive list" i didn't have to really have any skill. I just had to understand target priority and roll a lot of dice.

To me (and this is an opinion piece after all) competitive gaming would be the army list building phase taking a back seat to actually playing the game.

Ther are too many players that rely on their powerlist they found on the internet to win games, and that removes any credibility for wins when they are based off of exploitation of bad Games Workshop balance.

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the way you're putting it is basically rock paper scissors and balanced armies are someone putting a foot in instead of a hand.

Kind of. Rock paper and scissors all bring guns, anything else shows up empty handed. Rock paper and scissors all weigh in at 280 lbs and everyone is else is 150 lbs. Too much emphasis on rock paper and scissors. Show me a game where not getting to rely on crutches wins games, and that will be a game I consider competitive.

apparently where he plays everyone brings those casual lists to the tournament and don't bother bringing the strongest and their a game.

If you go in with a competitive mind set and face opponents that aren't competitive, of course you'll feel hollow about your win.

Poor internet tough guy. I can guarantee you that blood angels rhino rush lists in 3rd edition were anything but casual lists. The reason they didn't fare well against eldar starcannon spam had nothing to do with them not being internet bad-*** enough, but entirely because tournament tables had little terrain and they were a shooting gallery.

My leaf blower guard list - same thing.

These are games at actual tournaments, from local to regional to the old Games Workshop Grand Tournaments. There was nothing casual about any of it.

I find the comments about the "randomness" of weather in sporting events quite hilarious because weather is anything but random.

I played football for five years, soccer for fifteen, track and field for four, and baseball for five.

A football team that excels at passing cannot do so as well when its pouring down rain and windy. The weather is indeed random in that if you pull your schedule and look at your games, you have no idea what the weather is going to be on those games, but you have to deal with whatever weather is "rolled for on game day". It may very well make your game plan hell depending on "what you rolled for weather on game day".

[oldschoolgameroO]

To the first topic, Competitive Gaming is to me a game played between people where the skillset of the players are compared against and the player with the most skill should come out on top. This can be in anything, be it sports like football, soccer, or games like chess.

Competitive Gaming should primarily be resolved based on the skill of the player(s) involved and should be against players of roughly equal caliber.

That is exactly what tournament warhammer is. It's Two people who built list and pitting one list versus the other by doing the math. The skill comes in how they maneuver those pieces, what they shoot at, etc... Much like an athlete or a chess player, those are determined by experience and 'training.

For example, the game of football can be played by anyone. However, there is a large difference between a high school foot ball team, a college football team, and a professional football team. We expect that these teams be matched up against people in their same class or caliber.

It has been said already but, that's not true. Not everyone in those leagues are the same caliber. Let's take chess for example because we both agree that is competitive. They have several classes players are ranked into, I have played people in my rank that were both well above and well below my skill set but we're ranked the same as me. More often the not the skill set well below me stayed or grew in rank because they got lucky and faced someone in the rank that was worse then them or were lucky on a critical move against someone better.

Fighting sports such as boxing or mixed martial arts, or even wrestling, pair people up in weight classes, because there is nothing LESS competitive than setting a heavy weight fighter up against a 130 lb fighter.

Actually some MMAs don't have weight classes and I have seen several 'light weights' utterly destroy the heavier weight class. We're the skill comes in

Competitive players also have to deal with random elements in the form of weather, sporting venues, and things of that nature. Not only must they deal with them, they must overcome them.

Competitive Gaming ultimately seeks to determine who is the better overall player.

Saying chess is competative, you proved your self wrong on this one.

Why I feel 40k has never been a competitive game has nothing to do with its core rules. The things many people who claim to be competitive talk about hating, I don’t see as making any more or less “competitive”. Random charges, random powers, etc don’t make a game less competitive, they enforce a different set of skills and tactics that must be employed.

However, the lack of game balance between factions DOES make a game less competitive, and Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy have never had any real balance in any of the editions, which is to me why neither game is competitive nor has it ever been.

When competing in warhammer, players will actively seek to have their army list do as much of the heavy lifting as possible. In sports terms, it is the same as being handed a professional football team, being able to freely obtain all of the super star players in the league, and then also be given the caveat that one can play teams at the high school or college level, and if the weather is not preferable one has the power to change the weather so that conditions are always perfect.

That's exactly what ball club owners do, in a lot of sports it is who has the most money or who can get the best value. That's were the unequal points cost come in. Which relates to another point you brought up about getting a net list, spending tons of cash to get the right pieces and putting it on the table. If you took two players, a casual and a tourney player, gave them identical lists that both are familiar with and had them play 10 games, I would promise you the tourney player when the majority of the time because he knows how best to use said pieces. You get two tourney players then it be hard fought. It's all part of the competative part.

Using your analogy, a pro football team isn't going to spend money on an underdeveloped high school player when he can get a primed college athelete who is stronger and faster.

Your whole argument is circular.

None of these scenarios to me is competitive. I’d even go so far as to say that actively engaging in these types of contests is NON-COMPETITIVE because the skill of the player is secondary to how well the deck can be stacked. While that may be fine in a deck game like Magic: The Gathering – in a game of war where one expects tactics and strategies to be tested this falls very very short.

Have you ever played Magic™? Because along with chess and WH40k I have, competitively, and 'stacking' the deck is ti get the strategy you have into your deck out and hope your opponents strategy doesn't stop you. And making it so you hedge luck out of the picture so that strategy comes into play.

To me – for 40k to be truly a competitive game, the balance in all of the factions needs seriously overhauled. Barring that, a solid comp system needs put in place to put more builds in viable standings.

Actually, for casual play this needs to happen, for competative play unbalance is fine because if someone were to win on an 'weak list' it would show their skill, on a 'net' list it would still show their skill because most in likely their opponent did the same.

[/QUOTE]Second, for 40k to be truly a competitive game, tournaments should deviate from every table being the same and having the same scraps of terrain on them. This enforces certain build types. A truly good player should be tested on different types of boards, with different types of terrain and cover available. Start showcasing tournaments where some tables are like city scapes where line of sight is not freely given to every model on the table, and you’ll start to see lists shifting to accommodate the fact that you won’t always get to play on planet bowling ball and do nothing but shoot.[/QUOTE]

This I'll pseudo agree with, but that's the American meta. The euro/uk meta has a ton of terrain (hence a slow shift happening right now in American meta as they are struggling on the world competitions) and a decent amount of it sight blocking.

Third – for 40k to truly be a competitive game, the designers need to lessen or eliminate the ROCK/PAPER/SCISSORS aspect of the game. This has always existed, from the time I started playing in third edition, to today.

Rock, paper, scissors is pretty competative in my family. If you choose wrong you get slugged in the arm. And believe it or not, heavy meta in that too, lol

That really summarizes competitive 40k to me. I am not a great player. When you kick my crutches out from under me, I win as much as I lose, and I certainly would never have been able to win a tournament without a list that took advantage of no cover, and a meta which was dominated by blood angels players with a smattering of space wolf players.

I wanted to focus on this part of the story, that's what pro teams do. They take advantage of a disadvantage and play their strengths to it. You QB has a strong arm and and the opponent is weak against the pass, throw bombs. If they are super strong against the pass, you hedge your bet and run the ball.

The thing was, I was the 270 lb heavy weight fighter fighting 125 lb high school kids. I was the New England Patriots playing football games against Springfield High. There was nothing competitive about it. When I tried playing lists that did not exploit whatever was broken at the time, I didn’t do nearly as well. That to me again speaks volumes about competitive 40k.

.

And that's why you see a lot of the same players at top, the 125# people fall to the wayside and the 270# people end up during it out

It never has been competitive while the army rules are as imbalanced as they have always been and sadly has never really been a test of player skill or strategy so much as it has been a test with how good one is with rudimentary math and effective spreadsheet skills.

Being so many different pieces, nothing rudimentary math, much like a poker player, they are playing odds (another highly competative game by the way). And speaking of that math competitions are a thing too, and that is truly who is better at math. Tell one of those kids they are unskilled and aren't competative

[Charon]

That to me is not competitive. That's letting your army list do the work for you. When I was fielding my "competitive list" i didn't have to really have any skill. I just had to understand target priority and roll a lot of dice.

The point is: you can't let the list do "your work" if both lists are equally maxed out. Just does not work because the othr guys list is also "doing his work".
This can only work if one list is maxed out and the other is not.

Also this one:

I can guarantee you that blood angels rhino rush lists in 3rd edition were anything but casual lists. The reason they didn't fare well against eldar starcannon spam had nothing to do with them not being internet bad-*** enough, but entirely because tournament tables had little terrain and they were a shooting gallery.

You talk about past occurances, times changed and tables got a healthy amount of terrain nowadays.
But even if not: If you KNOW you are going to play on a billard table it is YOUR FAULT bringing an army that is disadvantaged by the lack of terrain. Thats part of the preperation. If you play to win, then you play to win and not "play to try to win with X when you know that your chances are better with Y".

[sparti67]

40k is all about the flavor of the month, or codex when it comes to competitive gaming. It happens every year. What is most frustrating is we the people suffer. There are so many folks who would play in tournaments but do not because their favorite army just doesn't have a death star to compete.

Since day one GW has been notorious for not making models for armies or writing rules for existing models that are absolutely useless in a competitive setting. I waited years for Dark Elf executioners. What about giving ballistic skills to fantasy chaos warriors and then telling people you can't use that skill?

The sports analogy works for me. In fantasy I would field a dragon or a blood thirster and my opponent had no answer. At the time very few units could hope to take on either model, they were some of the first "death stars" imo. Sure we had the same amount of points to work with, but if you didn't have a comparable unit to take the dragon on it was like the majors playing the minors. And at that time most people didn't invest money into the big creatures (at least in my area).

The only way to fix this problem is coming up with a universal set of house rules. That means limiting some units, not allowing certain formations and as was mentioned change up the scenarios/terrain. IMO tournaments are very vanilla. There are so many opportunities to bring flavor to your average and larger tournaments. Some creative thinking and outside the box ideas could bring in new gamers and have old gamers dust off some of those armies they never thought would see a table edge again. We need some good GM's for 40k

[HERO]

If you go in with a competitive mind set and face opponents that aren't competitive, of course you'll feel hollow about your win.

Bingo. Ding ding ding.

That describes exactly what I have right now. I'm a competitive player, playing against non-competitive people, and I cannot get the satisfaction or challenge that I need. It's important to find likeminded players, or else you're both wasting your time before you even put models on the table.

[Cap'nSmurfs]

It's important to find likeminded players, or else you're both wasting your time before you even put models on the table.

This is the core of it all, I think. It's a collaborative activity. You have to be on the same page with the people you're playing the game with to get the most out of it. I wouldn't say it's always a "waste of time", but you won't get the best experience out of it that you could.

[Popsical]

Ok read this and see if you can guess the player who wins more than 50 percent of the games played.
My little group of 4 players have been gaming 40k for 12 years.
All of us are fundamentally different in our style of gaming.

Player1's armies are made to fit the fluff of armies he likes in the books he reads. Always painted.

Player2's armies are made of models he likes only. Mostly painted.

Player3's armies are made of the latest models released and never the same ever. Half painted.

Player4's armies are made of the same optimum units in every game and seldom painted.

Go on have a guess who wins amost every time.

Also which one of us would you say was the most competitive?

[lantzkev]

let me guess player 2? I like monsterous creatures and they seem fairly in vogue.

[StingrayP226]

Bingo. Ding ding ding.

That describes exactly what I have right now. I'm a competitive player, playing against non-competitive people, and I cannot get the satisfaction or challenge that I need. It's important to find likeminded players, or else you're both wasting your time before you even put models on the table.

Actually you can challenge yourself if you put down that deathstar/spam list, and try a fluffy/odd list where you have to fight to overcome your own weaknesses.

Back when Mechwarrior clicks was hot I was the dominate player in my area for a while. I always played faction pure but even then I could create powerful faction lists that dominated the field as my oppenants were less skilled.

One solution was to build joke lists that just had some silly theme or strange combo of units. Then I tried to win... Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn't... to this day my best memories was my "Farmer's revolt" list that was purely agromechs, unarmored infantry, and some not MBT vees. It was a challenge to me as I had to build a list with heavy restrictions that took away my favored options and forced me to play something I was not comfortable with... and I had a blast!