Stop Your Whinging!

[CoffeeGrunt]

It's a good system, snappy and quick, promotes a lot of thinking ahead and exploiting your opponent's mistakes. I'll give it that, not my kinda game, but for a tournament-oriented player? Great.

However, one of the girls has started painting her Khador army white and gold, and people are complaining that they keep mistaking them for Menoth and apparently painting armies as other armies is illegal in tournaments, (ostensibly.) This put the nail in the coffin for my ice-blue Khador army I was contemplating painting up, sadly. A lot of people said it would be too similar to Cygnar at a distance to work in a game.

I agree with Xeno though, an awful lot of wargames lack customisation. Hell, very few even both with vehicles, and there's a lot you can do to personalise a tank. I'm excited to get my Bolt Action rolling so I can have stowage on the tanks with wisps of camo netting and sandbags up front. My Guard get similar treatment, with Veteran squads unanimously being custom kitbash, my Valkyries have Sunshark engines, all sorts.

It means the army is mine. If someone walks past a table, they can see, "oh, that's their army!" Everyone has a pretty distinct style here, from the army collected, to painting, to the models chosen, and it makes a game so much more enjoyable to watch than a particularly well painted Khador army vs a tabletop standard Menoth army.

Again, the draw for WMH et al seems to be the rules above everything, but in so doing they lose much of what pulled me into wargaming as a kid, and what brought me back as an adult years later...

[Erik Setzer]

If someone takes a very weak Tau army, yeah, Orks can give it a good fight. The only way for Orks to have a shot at a tricked-up Tau list is to go for some crazy stuff that no longer feels like you're running an Ork army. So, yeah, I guess if you can trick up ALMOST any army to take on tricked up versions of others, while completely throwing away the fluff and making something that no longer has the feel or spirit of the faction it's meant to represent, is "balanced," then sure, the game is balanced. As is every single game out there. A 100 pound man with muscular issues armed with a toothpick fighting a 250 pound man built like a linebacker and armed with a mace is also "balanced" in that sense, given that in theory the 100 pound man *could* beat the other man (and if he can't, he just "sucks").

Yes, that argument really is stupid, and I find it offensive that people keep trying it. Don't hand me a pile of garbage and tell me it's shiny gems and then expect me not to get offended.

The game is leaning too heavily on deathstars and super combos and utter garbage that is no fun to play against. I see more and more armies showing up that don't even remotely resemble the fluff. What happened to caring about that?

What happened to carry about the hobby at all? Seems people want to skip out on painting, don't really care about the fluff, and couldn't even be bothered to have WYSIWYG models. Just find the hardest combination and try to beat your opponent's face off, and as long as it's fun for you, who cares about the other guy?

Maybe I'm just too old for the hobby. I remember when they actually at least tried to balance things and would get rid of unbalancing junk or release updates for an army in FAQ/errata form to try to give it a competitive boost (without charging $50 for a new book). I remember when the players would at least try to paint, even if it didn't look amazing. I remember when players actually cared about what the others thought. But nope. Now it's just beat the other person's army into the ground, table them with some mash of unpainted figures that doesn't worry about the fluff, and if they don't like it, insult them repeatedly.

Good job. You're representing the GW hobby well as "The hobby for tossers who need their ego stroked and will eagerly insult anyone who doesn't go along with their ego-stroking." No wonder GW's losing customers. It's not just their own issues, it's the community as it's represented, pushing people to be the nastiest, most dick-like players they can, with no concern for the other people.

Stop insulting Warmachines and Hordes players. Their rulebook might say "play like you've got a pair" but it also encourages being a decent person, and I don't see many games of WM/H become a one-sided affair where the other person knows at setup that they have no choice. GW players have tried to look down their nose for so long at PP players, acting like they were better because they weren't WAAC players, but here we have people defending the WAAC attitude and wanting GW to break the game further because it's not broken if someone can buy their way to a win with enough money and lack of caring for the fluff.

Disgusting, and a shame to the hobby. Not just GW games, but the entire hobby of miniatures gaming. If this is what GW gaming has become, I welcome its demise, and hope GW hastens its own death so someone who respects the hobby can become the new top dog and maybe drives out the WAAC players by having genuine balance, which will send the special snowflakes running for the hills crying that they can't win all their games any more.

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However, one of the girls has started painting her Khador army white and gold, and people are complaining that they keep mistaking them for Menoth and apparently painting armies as other armies is illegal in tournaments, (ostensibly.) This put the nail in the coffin for my ice-blue Khador army I was contemplating painting up, sadly. A lot of people said it would be too similar to Cygnar at a distance to work in a game.

I painted my Menoth in dark red and bronze trim because I liked it more. No one complained.

In another thread on this forum, people went on for pages complaining about red Ultramarines.

If you can show me an actual rule about how an army is painted with Warmachine tournaments, that'd be great. I've never heard of that.

Look around the Internet, you can find plenty of people who paint Warmachine models in different colors from the "standard" colors.

You ran into a bad batch of people. The same kind of people exist in the GW hobby, as shown on this forum. And I actually lost painting points in a tournament once because my Ork army was painted with different units being different clans, which some of you might note is exactly how Ork armies looked in 2nd edition, but because it was 3rd edition people thought Ork armies had to look uniform and bland, and as my Ork army - ORKS! - were painted up with different clans (not in the same unit, mind you; it was a unit of Bad Moons here, a unit of Snakebites there, a unit of Evil Sunz, etc.), I was knocked on my score. So hey, yeah, I've seen a GW tournament penalize a person for actually painting their army the way it's SUPPOSED to be painted.

[Denzark]

ES - Your ork's paint job was penalised in a tournament - in Third Edition - so what, a decade ago?

[CoffeeGrunt]

He doesn't like to hold grudges...

That said Erik, great demo of the sort of whinging the OP was on about.

[Lord Manton]

That said Erik, great demo of the sort of whinging the OP was on about.

Maybe that's it. Maybe I've been missing it all this time. Erik isn't complaining about the game; he's complaining about the culture surrounding the game and the lack of a strong and healthy community.

I'll admit, if that's your complaint then keep complaining. There is a filthy and fetid side of this hobby that has nothing to do with Nurgle and everything to do with people wanting to smash other people's lists. I'm lucky. I get to catch up with a bunch of solid blokes (sadly gender diversity isn't easy to come by in this hobby) and play really fun, silly, exciting and sometimes (I'm terrible at finishing painting my armies-what I have painted is good though...) visually captivating games. But, try as White Dwarf and the designers might, there is a real struggle to break through the WAAC culture that we have in our beloved game. I dunno, maybe I just need to pay less attention to the 'net, but it really saddens me.

[ShadowcatX]

And here we have yet another attempt by the fluffy side to paint competitive players as somehow the enemy and bad for the hobby. But it isn't the competitive side who is calling names, or throwing around insults. It isn't the competitive side who docks people points for having unpainted minis or even refusing to play against people who have unpainted minis. Instead, we show up to play the game, and we do so to the best of our ability. We'd prefer the opponent show up with an equally competitive list and provide us a strong challenge, but if you don't we don't complain, we don't whine, we don't try and cast aspirations on your character, we just go about our day.

So maybe, just maybe, if there is a "filthy and fetid side of this hobby that has nothing to do with Nurgle" you should look to yourselves rather than trying to smear everyone else.

[Charistoph]

And here we have yet another attempt by the fluffy side to paint competitive players as somehow the enemy and bad for the hobby. But it isn't the competitive side who is calling names, or throwing around insults. It isn't the competitive side who docks people points for having unpainted minis or even refusing to play against people who have unpainted minis. Instead, we show up to play the game, and we do so to the best of our ability. We'd prefer the opponent show up with an equally competitive list and provide us a strong challenge, but if you don't we don't complain, we don't whine, we don't try and cast aspirations on your character, we just go about our day.

So maybe, just maybe, if there is a "filthy and fetid side of this hobby that has nothing to do with Nurgle" you should look to yourselves rather than trying to smear everyone else.

They exist on both sides, it's true. It's just usually easier to find the filthier players than the filthier (and I would say in some cases, snobbier) hobbiers.

[Erik Setzer]

ES - Your ork's paint job was penalised in a tournament - in Third Edition - so what, a decade ago?

The complaints about red Ultramarines were this morning.

And my army would have kept getting penalized until recently if I hadn't pointed out with several sources that I did exactly what you're supposed to do.

The same kind of stuff still happens. It's why I'm worried about painting a Skaven army with the units matching their clans, or a mixed Chaos force. Or, worse, my Rogue Trader army that will be, by its nature, a mix of units from around the Imperium (some of which are going to be heavily converted). I still get people to this day complaining that my Orks aren't all wearing dull, boring colors (including the newly painted Blood Axe force, which isn't brightly painted, but certainly isn't just monochromatic leathers... they're wearing different types of camo).

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He doesn't like to hold grudges...

That said Erik, great demo of the sort of whinging the OP was on about.

No grudge here, I quite like the guy who was scoring the tournament and had a nice game against him at the last tournament I played (where he was able to enjoy it as a player, not the organizer). But there's nothing wrong with remembering things, especially if they're relevant to a discussion.

Also, Coffee, great demo of the sort of disgusting, abhorrent attitude I've been on about. If someone disagrees with people, it's "whinging," and the insults come out rather than addressing the argument like adults.

[Tomgar]

You might be sick of moaners but I'm sick of people who treat any criticism of 40k or GW like a personal insult. I'm not a tournament gamer (I've never even entered a tournament) but even my little gaming group wishes there was a bit more rules balance. That's all. We just want a better-written game. We're not trying to suck all the fun out of your hobby, we're not uber competitive meta-gamers and we're not trying to kill GW or something, we just want better, tighter rules.

Yes, 40k is fun in its current state, but we think it'd be MORE fun with a more balanced ruleset. Maybe stop trying to paint people like us as meta-obsessed, hyper-competitive douches, just because we're offering an opinion on what would make the game better for us. That's our right as consumers and if you don't like it, don't read it.

[Erik Setzer]

Maybe that's it. Maybe I've been missing it all this time. Erik isn't complaining about the game; he's complaining about the culture surrounding the game and the lack of a strong and healthy community.

Little of Column A, little of Column B.

When I first started playing at the local Games Workshop store, it was a nice, friendly group, mostly newer gamers, who were into playing fun matches, and would play scenarios, and generally actually have fun with the games. People were into the fluff of their armies. It was good. The idea of building a list just to beat your opponent's face in was frowned on, and people who did that kind of thing weren't considered fun opponents (it was really just one guy, who was pretty open in his approach to the game; one other guy came into the mix, but was quickly shuffled out).

As time went on and they played more and read more on the Internet, it seems the accepted idea was to make the nastiest list you could, forget the fluff, and just do what you could to crush your opponent. People were no longer talking about how to make a list that matched a part of the fluff, they were looking at units solely by rules and trying to figure out how to build combos of units and items. Not just 40K, but WFB as well.

Maelstrom missions were thrown out the window quickly. It's hard to get a match in with them. Or even any kind of scenario game. People want to play straight "kill points" because it's easier than playing a narrative match. They can just take their killer combos and smack their opponent until the game is over.

So then I line up my army, designed to be able to compete with a variety of armies while matching the fluff, and then I see some weird amalgamation of stuff lined up across from me, unpainted, units arranged in manners to take advantage of rules so they end up looking ridiculous, no scenario, no story to the fight.

This is seen as the accepted way to play, too. I mentioned I wasn't a fan of getting my face caved in with an army designed to just crush people, and a guy offered not to tone his list down but rather to build such an army list for me... which I declined, because I know how to build such a list, but at that point it's no longer a fun game between friendly players but rather a stressful contest to see who can crush the other. I saw a "learning game" of WFB where one guy took a list of Chaos Warriors that was build to bash apart other hardcore lists, with the newbie using Bretonnians, and his "must-win" attitude got so bad the manager had to slam his hand down on the table to get the guy's attention and tell him to stop, because it was bad enough to bring a face-caving list to a learning game, it was just that much worse bickering over rules and all to try to get an advantage.

That's the now accepted mentality. It's spreading. And the Internet's answer is for anyone who doesn't like it to "stop whinging" and go play something else.

40K has never been 100% balanced. I get that. But at least some of the nastier issues were balanced by the fact people would admit that, and realize we're all here to have fun playing a game, and if someone needed to pad their ego with beating someone else's face in, that's what tournaments are for. And in a tournament, yeah, you bring the nastiest junk you can (though it's telling that the same armies tend to cluster at the top). But on a regular Saturday, when some of us have had a long week at work and we just want to unwind? No, I don't want to line up my Tactical Company of Marines with bolter drill across from a Space Wolf army tooled up to shred people with multiple special characters and all the specialist units running a specific detachment just to get its bonus. Or put my combined arms Ork army down across from an Iyanden army with all the Wraithguard and Wraithblades deployed in Wave Serpents until I'm close enough for them to get out and wipe out whatever the Serpents and Wraithknights haven't already shredded. I know sometimes I make a mistake with a list, but I generally don't make weak lists, and I know I'm not bad at the game. I just want to play a fun, narrative game, that's closely contested, rather than someone being tabled.

But yeah, that's what GW games are meant to be now: Crush your opponent, screw the fluff, ignore the narrative. If your opponent doesn't like it, mock and insult him until he quits the hobby. Rinse and repeat.