Okay, I'll give a fair warning, this will be something of a rant, but not a rant directed at Games Workshop. The only kind of connection that could be made there is that the players I'll be ranting about play at a Games Workshop store.
Short history: The local GW store has seen the playerbase shift pretty much to a beat-your-face-off group, who greet every new codex with combing it in order to find the best way to milk it for a winning army, with people eagerly throwing their money at buying the hottest new stuff to win. So now you have an idea of the mindset there. As a contrast, the players at a local store named FLGS (yes, they actually named the store FLGS) are mostly people who've played for a long time, and are more drawn to narrative style battles, while still trying to be competitive.
Over the past weekend, there was a local gaming convention, which included a Warhammer 40,000 tournament. The tournament was hosted by a local guy who used to run a store and has run a number of tournaments in the past ~15 years. He likes to make his own missions, with a narrative slant. For example, you might have a mission when a primary objective of destroying the other army, and a secondary objective of claiming objective markers, with the two objectives able to be claimed by different players. The idea is that you're not just trying to sweep away the opposing army, you're also trying to grab precious cargo. Another mission would be like the Relic, with a twist, or quadrant-holding (like old-school Cleanse, again with a variation). He did a mission for a recent club tournament that included "passing" the objective almost like a soccer match (though when it's that far outside the "norm," he usually saves it for the club events). Interesting stuff, makes you actually have to think about what you're doing and the army you bring.
I was reading post-tournament comments in the local GW chat. (There was a Facebook chat set up for people at the GW store to discuss random stuff, mostly GW.) Post-tournament congrats were fine, especially as the tourney winner was a player from the GW store with his Eldar Wraith army (pretty much a Wraithhost with a Seer Council attached). Then things started getting bad, with comments claiming "favoritism" in the tournament. I have no idea what the army that won best painted looked like, but there might have been a reason it beat the GW manager's army (which admittedly was quite nice, it was a Haemonculus army with a lot of conversions painted in an Attack on Titan style with the bigger guys). Then claims of the FLGS players being "afraid" to play the GW players and matchups pitting players from the stores against other players from the same store... though anyone who knows about the concept of the Swiss format that looks to pit similarly-powered armies against each other would know why that was done. It was all just coming off as serious whining about another store's players (and guys I'd known who weren't going to try shenanigans just to win a tournament).
This morning, though, came the comment that put me over the edge. I dropped from the chat, and I don't think I'll be spending any more money with the GW store, despite its convenient location:
"any one else notice each of those weird sc's favored armies with lots of troops? and the guy who wrote them was playing a demon factory army?"
This army was made by a guy who constantly tries to create gimmicky power armies and find any kind of advantage in the rules he can (too often getting the rules wrong in the process). If the army he was playing at the GW store on Saturday was an indication, he likely took a Harlequin/Craftworld combo designed to try to use crazy psychic stuff and combos of special rules. I could go on and on with the kind of stuff he tries to pull with armies.
To come right out and basically accuse a guy of setting up a tournament just to make it easier for him to win is ridiculous. For one thing, the guy who did the scenarios would have only been playing if there was an odd number (as he was running the tournament), and when he does that, he always excludes himself from any prizes. So what would be the point of setting up scenarios that he could win easier?
The scenarios are designed to be interesting, narrative, and require actual tactical thinking and a balanced army, rather than trying to blow your opponent off the table. I personally love that concept. It's how the games are "meant" to be played.
Instead of celebrating interesting scenarios that reward people for taking balanced armies and applying tactical thinking, we have a player accusing the tournament organizer of writing scenarios to benefit his own army that couldn't even place in the tournament. And not a single other person, GW store manager included, called him on it.
The guy being accused is also one of the nicest guys I've played in games. Last year I faced off against him in a convention tournament (different con, different organizer), and he was great to play against. Really fun game, and we both let each other correct a mistake where we maybe skipped ahead too fast and forgot to shoot or move a unit or something. A nice, gentlemanly game. At a tournament. Think about the attitude people have about tournament players, now imagine someone at a tournament saying, "Oh, you forgot to do this, you should do that." That's the kind of guy we're talking about here. I actually lost the secondary objective in that mission to him because he summoned some Daemons and I couldn't get in a spot to kill his Sorceror or slay enough Daemons, but I won't blame the mission, as those things were my own fault.
When that level of whining and baseless accusations is considered acceptable, I can't see myself playing games with those people. And as I'm not about to play games with them (or in a store that condones such attitudes), I'm not about to spend money there.
I'm not letting it drive me from 40K (heck, the cheaply made book I just paid $60 for and the realization I needed to spend $500-$600 to get my Marines in "competitive" shape would have done more for that). But I think I'm more convinced than ever that I'd rather play with another group of players, and I'm not about to recommend to anyone I know that they play at the local GW store, until that attitude is corrected.
Am I just being too harsh here? Are such accusations not a big deal?