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

[Denzark]

So no game with any amount of luck can be competitive? No miniatures game that uses dice or any random factor. Not even poker can truly be competitive.

I see how that is difficult, but Poker mathshammer, the odds are steady. everyone at the table has same starting odds. That ain't the case in a tournament where certain armies will mean their winning T1 is hugely advantageous.

Except there's ways to get around that stuff, for the most part. "Hedge your bets" in different ways, basically. Make sure luck can't hurt your army too much. Part of the skill is in building lists, so if you built a nastier list, you're a better player in that part of the game at least.

I am unsure if you can call copy pasting a netlist and happening to have the money to purchase it, skilled. Its Pavlovian but is there much skill to that aspect?

Pretty much the only games that could be considered competitive, with such a definition, are chess, checkers, and the like.

If the definition of competitive is where the single most important deciding factor is player ability then the less random factors, the more innate talent is required so I probably agree.

[Auticus]

odd points and a completely silly argument in total...

Your condescension is noted. Let me reply in kind.

Have you ever gone to a soccer tournament? there's alot of teams you will outright destroy, they were by far "terrible" and not of the same caliber... like wise with pro football... there's alot of teams that just aren't that great. like Cleveland Browns, who haven't ever even seen a superbowl game let alone won a superbowl.Attachment 12895

Gleans past the quote which was that pro footballers playing high school footballers is not competitive. Citing that some pro teams are not as good as others is like trying to explain to me that water is wet. No ****. The Cleveland Browns may have never won a super bowl, but the worst Cleveland Browns team in history would still seal-club a high school team, which is about the same to me as loading down on a power list of any era and facing someone's balanced list with it.

Not true, I'm guessing pro bowlers aren't competitive or any indoor pro game....

We call this a strawman considering that none of my statement talked about how every competitive person on the planet has to be played outdoors.

not true at all, most competitive games/sports are played on the EXACT same terrain, weather is attempted to be controlled, all random elements are minimized or reduced. Hell in 40k, you can buy your own terrain and change the map so to speak, likewise, the missions and deploy change the importance of terrain. And on the last issue with this point, you site a reason "it enforces certain builds" but you don't even provide anecdotal evidence.

I've played many competitive sports. Your assertions are incorrect in regards to sports. You cannot control weather. Attempting to control the weather in an outdoor sports event is like climbing a tree and screaming at the storm. Good luck with that.

"enforces certain builds" is pretty easy to spot. You can google up about 100 battle reports that show just how playing on sparse tables effects what builds you will see in the competitive environment.

did you watch the LVO?

Nope sure didn't. However, twenty years of tournaments have shown me that for the most part all of them play on sparse tables. If this year's LVO was not, and there was a lot of terrain, then great - glad to see that changing. That is still not the norm though.

What would you suggest otherwise? Why do you think there shouldn't be hard/soft counters? you've come up with a point, but sighted no reason as to why it's bad for competition.

Because PAPER/ROCK/SCISSORS is a poor competitive sport.

Wait so you're telling me you won and were competitive, because you knew what the field would be like and the predominate strategy was?
Gee, that sounds awful to win because of planning and foresight.

[/quote]

Knowing that I'd be clubbing baby seals with my planning and foresight wasn't a very impressive competitive victory. It was actually pretty worthless, and I keep most of my plaques and trophies in a box in a closet because they weren't won with anything other than knowing how to stack odds in my favor through rules exploits, exploiting poor balance, and poor tournament terrain. I don't consider that something to be proud of.

[Path Walker]

Some people think that the list building stage is part of the competiton, however, due to the very nature of the game, all lists can't be equal, meaning there are certain lists that are better than others and so its likely that there is always going to be a list that is probably mathmatically superior to most it will face, some people will judge that as part of the competition, however, that relies on the competitor being willing to collect and paint a new army to fit in with which ever army is most likely to do well that time. This is constantly in flux given the nature of the game and new releases.

If you factor in that within the subsect of hobbyists who play the game and then the smaller fraction of those that do some competitivly and see how many would be willing or able to do that and you're left with a tiny minority of people who can for all intents and purposes, be more mathematically likely to win the game based on an advantage given to them because they could buy the best list. If there was a large amount of competitors doing this, it would balance out, if you knew that every player was taking [Insert name of flavour of the month netlist], then you'd have to try and think of something to hard counter that or counter the counter, ad infinitum. However, as there are likely to be only one or two players per tournament willing or able to play the meta like that, given that its an expense and dedication timewise for little or no recompense, then you will have the one or two netlist players who can do that dominating.

Now, to fix that? Well, the obvious solution is to better balance the armies so that 1000 points spent anywhere is equally effective, this isn't going to happen, GW aren't interested in it, so lets consider it off the table.

The only other concievable way is to either accept that exploiting the rules of the game to make more powerful lists is part of the game and embrace that, knowing you'll effectilvy allow some players to buy an advantage, I'm not condeming this approach, professional sports have this, the richer teams get better results and therefore richer, its accepted as part of competition.

Or you can try and mitigate the ways that one list can dominate, having a variety of mission types, not available ahead of time, and terrain set ups that mean you can't reasonably predict what you'll need the army to do mean you would be forced to tone down some aspects to cope.

Dropping down the accepted points value helps here too, at 1850 - 2000 armies can build in enough redundancy to not have to worry about it. 1500 means less room and you have to generalise a lot more.

[TheyStoleMyName!]

When I used to be a TO I always wanted to run an "Everyone is Equal" event where every round had a single army designed by the TO given to EVERY player to use. These lists would be mediocre in power at best - you'd be as likely to see Scout Bikers as you would Centurions, and never any abusive HQ combos.

Obviously this would be logistically impossible, but I always thought it would be cool to see how the player base straightened itself out if they were handed, say, a Codex company and told to fight each other with it. Might we see "weaker" players who were used to playing around the weaknesses of their own army do better than "elite" players who were used to breaking codexes as their primary strength? Most tournament players I know ARE very good, regardless of what they use, but there always is at least a couple people who just try to dump a netlist and go, stacking dice odds so far in their favour that they'll beat most average players handily.

Anyway, obviously a pipe dream, but it was just something that I thought would be an interesting experiment at some point. Heck with things like Vassal out there, it might even be possible at a basic level!

[Charon]

The Cleveland Browns may have never won a super bowl, but the worst Cleveland Browns team in history would still seal-club a high school team, which is about the same to me as loading down on a power list of any era and facing someone's balanced list with it.

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?

[Moriar52]

pretty good post. it is true that most of the tournament winners are near enough the same lists of that particular race/combination of races. much as those people like winning it is off putting when your opponent puts his army on the table and you have a pretty good idea of how screwed you are and the only thing you don't know is what turn you lose your last model. though that said it is funny when the power gamer you're playing gets pissed off cos your army isn't dying fast enough according to their plan.

[lantzkev]

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?

to further go in his own ridiculous argument.

Knowing that I'd be clubbing baby seals with my planning and foresight wasn't a very impressive competitive victory. It was actually pretty worthless, and I keep most of my plaques and trophies in a box in a closet because they weren't won with anything other than knowing how to stack odds in my favor through rules exploits, exploiting poor balance, and poor tournament terrain. I don't consider that something to be proud of.

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

Where I play, we have about 18 players in our tournaments, and about 8 of them are "bringing the A game" they will bring what the most powerful thing they can is, and most effective. And when you watch those 8 play each other, it's a good close game nearly every time baring odd luck.

When they play those outside of the 8, it's not exactly one sided, but it's very tilted.

[Moriar52]

same to me as loading down on a power list of any era and facing someone's balanced list with it.
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?

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

[Defenestratus]

I've often marveled at how similar my two favorite hobbies are. One of them I consider a sport in the competitive sense, another I do not. 40k is the one I do not simply because both sides are not subject to the same set of random odds, nor are the two participants going into the "competition" with equal odds of winning. While the points value of each model may give the appearance of equal odds of winning, everyone knows that the points system is broken and unable to account for a perfectly balanced playing field. I don't buy the idea that list building and creation takes skill and talent - and unfortunately its the biggest part of the game that determines the winner.

My other hobby is sailing. And sailboat racing is something I do consider competitive. While there is certainly a lot of "luck" involved, its amazing how the best sailors always seem to create luck for themselves over and over and over again. There is a certain type of racing called "One Design" which means that when you're racing, you're racing against boats that are 100% the same as each other. They have rules that include crew weight restrictions so that the physics of the sailing vessels are effectively equal and the ultimate winner of the race is as much as possible up to the skill and talent of the sailors. In essence, I feel that if 40k was going to be competitive, then the competitiors should be forced to use the same lists against each other - or at least be able to chose from a predetermined set of lists.

I find the comments about the "randomness" of weather in sporting events quite hilarious because weather is anything but random. Indeed, we sailors time wind shift oscillations, and the best amongst us can sense when a pivotal wind direction change is about to happen, and take tactical advantage of it. Personally I'm not there yet, but I can see wind's effects on the surface of the water, and from 100m away I could tell you the velocity and relative direction of the wind on the water surface. I can look at clouds on the horizon and estimate the time that the thermal transfer "sea breeze" is going to kick in during the afternoon and its relative strength based on how hot the sand is on my feet before I left the beach, and how cold the water is when I shoved off. The point being, while the circumstances that we compete upon might seem completely random, we have distinct skills that we have developed to adapt and deal with those environmental factors. This skill would almost be akin to being able to see what your charge distance roll was going to be before you moved your units in the movement phase. Sure we know that the average of two dice thrown is a total of 7", but deciding whether or not to put a squad in range to charge during the movement phase based off of that average isn't a set of skills developed over time and experience or talent - its called playing to lottery. Its odds based. There's no skill or talent you could use as a competitor to affect that roll - and that is the problem. 40k Is a game of playing random statistics, and those statistics can and often do determine the winner.

[lantzkev]

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.