ITC, Cheesemongers, and you!

[alexcragg]

My issue:

Every single rule change.

 

By tamping down on a few 'broken' issues then proceeding to exploit all the 'broken' things left in the game I feel that Frontline game ENCOURAGES what I considers Beardy lists :  Lists designed to exploit gray areas or just plain abusive nonsense.

 

FAQ is one thing - amateur game design based on the whims of Bob and Steve doesn't interest me.

[galahad911]

That's a non answer. You have a personal issue with the concept but have no real specific things you can point to and say that's the problem. If you think getting rid of 2+ rerolls and changing Invisibility made the game worse then I can't think you and I are even playing the same game. I know I don't want to fight things that only fail 1 save in 36 or just can't be targeted or hurt by anything respectively. I know I don't want to play games where the D chart hasn't been changed and Eldar armies *easily* bring 20 D weapons and obliterate my army in 2 shooting phases. Beyond those I can't think I one actual rule change that strongly and adversely affected any particular army, hence why I'm looking for what the problem is.

 

What's particularly humorous to me is that imposing "rules" on players to avoid "beardy" lists is changing the rules of the game in exactly the same way and the changes in this format. They've just been itemized so everyone knows what they are, rather than the line moving from one person's opinion of what's cheesy to the next.

 

Thanks anyway though. I wish I were surprised.

[Limey_ElJonson]

I don't so much want to clutter up this thread, but this didn't get answered as far as I saw and I am genuinely interested. If you and/or Alex wouldn't mind starting another thread, in the 40k forum maybe, I would appreciate it. I am honestly trying to understand your point of view here. Not trying to pick an argument or anything like that.

That's cool. Just had real life the last day or so. Stupid thing always gets in the way! :-P

[doc]

Actually it is a perfectly fine answer...

As for the specifics - changing RULES is GW's job, not a badly designed poll voted on by a limited community for their own selfish ends (yes).

Why was the 2++ changed, why was invisibility nerfed? why was D toned down. Because people who got owned by those RULES fundamentally cried about it and did want to not lose. Ah, diddums!
 

Now you get ITC, AdepticCon etc players who are able to tailor their lists knowing no big scary-nasty-monsters will be turning up to ruin their day. Trust me, the power level at AdeptiCon is [big bad swear word]ing disgusting.

Yes, 20 D eldar weapons sucks... not going to argue that. However we are talking about OFCC, where fun is the rule and your have the HoGs checking lists for [big bad swear word]e like that. Eldar players now see no merit in taking a few D weapons they have little power (in relation to their army's ability) now.

So, no, we don't need the errata "section" of the ITC-FAQ.

 

[galahad911]

Actually it is a perfectly fine answer...

 

As for the specifics - changing RULES is GW's job, not a badly designed poll voted on by a limited community for their own selfish ends (yes).

Why was the 2++ changed, why was invisibility nerfed? why was D toned down. Because people who got owned by those RULES fundamentally cried about it and did want to not lose. Ah, diddums!

 

Now you get ITC, AdepticCon etc players who are able to tailor their lists knowing no big scary-nasty-monsters will be turning up to ruin their day. Trust me, the power level at AdeptiCon is [big bad swear word]ing disgusting.

 

Yes, 20 D eldar weapons sucks... not going to argue that. However we are talking about OFCC, where fun is the rule and your have the HoGs checking lists for [big bad swear word]e like that. Eldar players now see no merit in taking a few D weapons they have little power (in relation to their army's ability) now.

 

So, no, we don't need the errata "section" of the ITC-FAQ.

 

 

 

Wait, so you've seen what GW has been doing with their "rules" over the last couple years and you're going to stand on their being the only ones good enough to write them? And completely ignore the point that the *completely* arbitrary comp that is put on the event is quite literally the exact same concept with the only difference being that ITC actually tells you what's not okay, whereas what causes people to complain about "beardy" lists is wildly different from person to person.

 

What exactly is the difference between the rules changes made for this particular format and the rules changes to army construction you place on people so that you won't call them names like "cheesy asshat filthmongers"?

[doc]

Yes, GW are the only ones good enough to write them - as it is their IP...

As for composition; it affects EVERYONE.

[galahad911]

So you would rather play with a broken rule set and not even attempt to make things better for no other reason than they were the original author? It seems exceptionally silly to me to just accept things only taking 1 wound in 36, or not being able to target them at all, or fighting 20-30 D weapons just because they wrote them. GW is bad at writing rules. The first step to fixing a problem is realizing there is one.

 

And the 2+ reroll change, and the invisibility change, and the D weapon change affect everyone too. You won't give any specifics beyond those that I asked for so those have to be the ones that are the issue. It's not like there are armies that are not having those changes applied to them.

[CaptainA]

Actually it is a perfectly fine answer...

 

As for the specifics - changing RULES is GW's job, not a badly designed poll voted on by a limited community for their own selfish ends (yes).

Why was the 2++ changed, why was invisibility nerfed? why was D toned down. Because people who got owned by those RULES fundamentally cried about it and did want to not lose. Ah, diddums!

 

Now you get ITC, AdepticCon etc players who are able to tailor their lists knowing no big scary-nasty-monsters will be turning up to ruin their day. Trust me, the power level at AdeptiCon is [big bad swear word]ing disgusting.

 

 

 

 

 

Your arguments don't make a lot of sense to me Doc.

 

Many of the polls that were voted on went the opposite way you would think if people wanted to nerf their enemy. Eldar Scatterbikes and the Ork FW Stompa for example. Both kept/allowed in by a pretty large majority.

 

Adepticon is an ITC event, in that you can get ITC points, but that is it! For the past few years, the reason the lists were so disgusting, is that they went by the book for GW.

 

To be blunt, it feels like you and many others are latching onto the topic of rules being changed, which the ITC has done, and making everying the ITC does therefore negative, without much actual knowledge of what is or has happened in the world of ITC. I know it fairly intimately.

[Lord Hanaur]

Holy crap.  Played an ITC event today.  I was very unhappy to learn of the new changes in the way the missions run.  Note that I did not say the missions.  The missions are fine.  The way they are run is not fine.  Just as brain food for those organizing this, and fully understanding that none of the actual ITC missions may even be used, but these problems came up during the last game of the tournament and it was not fun to deal with.    

 

Here's the set up:  Time is running out.  Both players know this is it.  What both players were NOT thinking about until it came time to do the scoring was that the Maelstrom Objectives stopped mattering.  Or I guess i should say, they should have stopped mattering at the top of the last round.  I knew it, he didn't, I didnt roll for mine, he did and it created a big mess.  It clearly did not dawn on either of us what this would cause until it was time to rack up the points and the ensuing confusion that prevailed.

 

The new way the Maelstrom objectives are run reads (as best we could tell) that 

 

A.  You roll 3 dice, instead of 2, for which Maelstrom thing you're going to do and choose two.  Didn't like that, because that made it almost not random at all.  Three of the missions are generally the same(kill something, get X or move somewhere).  But that isn't the main thing.

B:  You don't roll until your player turn.  Big change.  Like, really big, when you think about how that is applied.  I can see the logic:  They are basically suggesting that the second player could always Clown Player A, plus knows where they are before deploying at some controllable cost to player B (though there is no such thing as NO cost so player B IS going to have to absorb some damage as a price for this) and this is still true but now is also true for player A, who can now Clown plyaer B.  It's not unreasonable, although it does minimize the ability to score Maelstrom  points by anyone and so that makes it way too easy to just pursue the first objective and say the heck with the Melstrom one as it is now so hard to score them.  It also makes dealing with Alpha strikes very difficult, as if alpha strikes needed the help, by making it so that Null deploying and such are now at GREAT cost bcause a maelstrom point sacrificed for the greater good of the overall armies health can end the game for you in round one, given how hard they are to get the rest of the game.  So Alpha Strikes won here and i am not sure I think they should.  There are other lines of thought on this and it gets deeper but that's one of the big things that I personally learned from it today.

C.  You cant SCORE them until the beginning of your next turn!  THIS is the biggest thing right here.  it also means that only Player A, the potential alpha striker, can affect the totals at the end.  Player B cannot.  

 

So in our game, at the very end, knowing that it was our last turn, i didn't bother rolling for Maelstrom stuff.  big mistake because it caused the scoring to be so confusing later (long story).  But regardless, even if i had, it literally wouldn't have mattered.  Same for him.  He rolled but they didn't matter.  Not one bit.  So in other words in the last round, maelstrom objectives simply didn't matter in the sense that we could not change the totals.

 

This has GOT to be a mistake.  But that's what it says as far as we could tell.  Maelstroms have been minimized in a pretty big way here and yet they are a 4 point thing still.  Hmm...  i mean its a bit oxymoronic if you think about it.  To have it not matter the last round seems bad policy.  If you don't do C (above), then you can't do point B, because B relies on point C to be true to make it work.

 

hmm...

 

Just thought I'd bring it to your attention.  i have no idea if this impacts planning at all but its a BIG hole in the process of the missions.

 

Also:  I've played the Relic mission in two tournaments in a row, i won them both using both interpretations of the Relic rules.  I can say unequivocally that despite that success I do hate that particular mission at a tournament.  So if there is any hope in Gods green Earth of avoiding it, let's do that.

 

Just food for thought.

[pretre]

Holy crap.  Played an ITC event today.  I was very unhappy to learn of the new changes in the way the missions run. 

 

I'm gonna stop you right there and ask you to start a new thread. That has nothing to do with the 40k team event and will only cause more confusion.

[VonVilkee]

...other stuff...

 

To be blunt, it feels like you and many others are latching onto the topic of rules being changed, which the ITC has done, and making everying the ITC does therefore negative, without much actual knowledge of what is or has happened in the world of ITC. I know it fairly intimately.

To be fair a big part of their complaint is it is yet more stuff to read and be familiar with and the fact that you drew on your fairly intimate knowledge continues to leave them out in the cold as it were. I'm getting the feeling it isn't the changes it is the fact that they were changed. Mostly they are garage gamers that are nice ish to one another, don't need help playing above board as it were and don't want to worry about extra layers of bureaucracy.

 

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong boys.

[Lord Hanaur]

I'm gonna stop you right there and ask you to start a new thread. That has nothing to do with the 40k team event and will only cause more confusion.

Well thats fine but it seemed we were talking about ITC here and as they are planning, this seemed relevant info for their planning. Its just an FYI though and I think it is important to note.

[galahad911]

To be fair a big part of their complaint is it is yet more stuff to read and be familiar with and the fact that you drew on your fairly intimate knowledge continues to leave them out in the cold as it were. I'm getting the feeling it isn't the changes it is the fact that they were changed. Mostly they are garage gamers that are nice ish to one another, don't need help playing above board as it were and don't want to worry about extra layers of bureaucracy.

 

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong boys.

 

Complaining about something being changed that has zero effect on you is silly. If there was a change that directly affected someone at the OFCC I could understand the problem. But there hasn't been any major changes that are going to have any bearing on OFCC armies. Essentially, bitching about the ITC changes is bitching that they took away your 2+ rerolled saves, or that they took away book invisibility, or your ability to kill whatever a D weapon is pointed at nearly without fail. All of those things are *terrible* for the game and, to a much greater extent, terrible for the guy on the other side of the table that is having his game ruined by unkillable units and weapons that destroy his models with no recourse. The things they've taken out of the game with the changes made have been for the betterment of the game as a whole.

 

Screaming "OMG they're changing rules! BAD!" when you seemingly have no idea what they've changed is really, really childish.

[Lord Hanaur]

Wowa.

[pretre]

Well thats fine but it seemed we were talking about ITC here and as they are planning, this seemed relevant info for their planning. Its just an FYI though and I think it is important to note.

The team event is not using anything except the FAQ from what I've heard. Talking about the new missions isn't going to help the discussion.

[Lord Hanaur]

The team event is not using anything except the FAQ from what I've heard. Talking about the new missions isn't going to help the discussion.

well...I said the new missions werent the issue.  it was how they are scored and when.  That was the focus of the post.  I also said I understood that the missions might not even be used.  My concern was the way they were scored.

 

So it was contextual.

[VonVilkee]

Complaining about something being changed that has zero effect on you is silly. If there was a change that directly affected someone at the OFCC I could understand the problem. But there hasn't been any major changes that are going to have any bearing on OFCC armies. Essentially, bitching about the ITC changes is bitching that they took away your 2+ rerolled saves, or that they took away book invisibility, or your ability to kill whatever a D weapon is pointed at nearly without fail. All of those things are *terrible* for the game and, to a much greater extent, terrible for the guy on the other side of the table that is having his game ruined by unkillable units and weapons that destroy his models with no recourse. The things they've taken out of the game with the changes made have been for the betterment of the game as a whole.

 

Screaming "OMG they're changing rules! BAD!" when you seemingly have no idea what they've changed is really, really childish.

Again they aren't complaining so much about the changes nor the effect (or lack there of) but the fact that they have to even check if there is an effect. They have good games with their buddies with out the need of extra layers of rules and therefore they don't want to be bothered having to check another whole layer when they can bearly keep the GW base stuff straight.

 

Time investment is a thing some invest it in painting or building conversions, while others spend more checking rules. Personally I'd rather spend that extra 30-60 minutes every so often on making my models look cooler than learning how to construct itc lists and the rule change effects...

[galahad911]

Again they aren't complaining so much about the changes nor the effect (or lack there of) but the fact that they have to even check if there is an effect. They have good games with their buddies with out the need of extra layers of rules and therefore they don't want to be bothered having to check another whole layer when they can bearly keep the GW base stuff straight.

 

Time investment is a thing some invest it in painting or building conversions, while others spend more checking rules. Personally I'd rather spend that extra 30-60 minutes every so often on making my models look cooler than learning how to construct itc lists and the rule change effects...

 

30-60 minutes? It's 24 pages, and you only need to read the section pertaining to your own army. This is not a huge investment of time. Whether or not you can get good games with your buddies in a garage has exactly zero relevance to whether or not an event needs to use a given FAQ. 

 

I'm sorry, but I'm just going to be straight up honest with you here. If a person cannot even be bothered to read a few pages of text, and that is literally the only reason they have for throwing a fit and saying they aren't going to come to OFCC... If there really isn't ANY other complaint other than I don't want to have to bother reading a 24 page document... I mean, really? How effing childish or self-centered can you possibly be?

 

If someone had issue with the actual content. If the changes themselves were causing the problem, I could understand the complaint. But you just don't want to have to read a few pages? Wow...

[VonVilkee]

Some people myself included are not satisfied with just reading my own army. If you are captaining then you have to make sure the whole team is up to snuff. An additional document adds allot! If your team mates are not used to using it you have to sell it to them. Woe betide you if something accidentally impacts their army it was back in the day very common for changes especially composition type to negatively effect lower tier garage builds that due to their less competitive slant would become unusable. You are asking people to spend even longer than that considering all of the pieces.

 

I'll admit I'm a little obsessive but if the point of the document is to avoid surprises you need to read and understand the whole document and be ready to remember it mid game otherwise why even bother?

[WestRider]

If GW put out a FAQ that was equally comprehensive, would y'all have an issue with OFCC using it? Or if CaptainA and MMT put together their own FAQ from scratch for the event? Because the fundamental issue here is that GW don't do their jobs right, and give us a rules set that's full of holes, and someone has to get it sorted.

 

Of all the available options, the ITC FAQ has some serious advantages in that it's already known to many Players, it's readily available months before the event so no one has reason to get blindsided by anything in it, and it takes work off the TOs, so they can focus on the stuff relevant to this specific event.

[DisruptiveConduct]

Multiple posts from the OFCC 40k Team Event thread are now here. Please feel free to continue your discussion.

 

For the Good of the Order

OF Chaplain

[fluger]

Both ITC and those who are against ITC are actually trying to do the exact thing.  Both want to impose some kind of arbitrary standard on 40k that they feel makes the game more fun and accessible.  

 

While many have stated that 40k is FINE without rules changes, they always add the caveat (in some way) that they then self-police the event to cut down on "cheese", "beardy", "power-gamers", etc.  So, even though you don't formalize your restrictions, you enforce them with name calling and shame.  Like, we all know that out of the box Wraithknights are over powered and under priced.  The ITC solution is to limit the number of them formally (only 1 per army) and decrease the power of the D shooting it has.  The other option is just make fun of the person who wants to bring 3 to the event until they relent.  

 

The difference is two-fold, a willingness to change broken rules formally and actually putting things down on paper so everything is clear.  The rest is just arguing about where on the spectrum you fall in terms of thinking one thing is too powerful or not.  

[Lord Hanaur]

Well to be fair...  and i assume most people wish to be fair...  The ITC as an idea is what I support.  It is the execution that hurts the feelings.  The ITC had all this potential to do good things.  I think we all want the end RESULT the ITC seeks.  Of course they do.

 

But results differ from intent here.  And that is where the paths diverge.  So i think a reasonable TO can say "ITC FAQ, except X, Y and Z" without fear.  I think that many TO's simply won't.  They feel as if their event will somehow be diminished if they aren't whole hog ITC.  But as this, and one THOUSAND threads like it, illustrate there are plenty of people who would support the TO if he were to do just this.

 

Many events are cropping up.  we are one of the most fertile gaming communities in existence in my opinion.  We have a healthier outlook on the game than a lot that are expressed on forums elsewhere.  I am kind of proud of our Portland to Bellingham connection actually.  

 

The ITC isn't perfect and anyone who gets up and says so gets berated or told how arrogant they are for acting like they "know better" and whatever other weak sauce there is.  But can we not be intellectually honest and say they've missed the mark a few times and just kind of..  not follow 100% of it?

 

As long as people know ahead of time that it's happening, no one complains.  OFCC hasd a lot of lead time to tell people that.  So the OFCC of all events should have little or no problem deciding amongst its HOG's if there may be a few stray things they don't like about it.  As it is we aren't adhering to the format (yay!) and allowing more stuff to be played.  While I am a well documented not-fan of Forge World and such, the reality is, I haven't actually run into a single forge world wielding opponent I couldn't handle so the self policing is happening to some extent or other.

 

the ITC thing has become so polar.  I argue vociferously against certain elements of the ITC as do others.  But I dont think its all bad.  Problem is, lots of people want to either burn it wholesale at the stake or they want to hug it and call it George and TO's rarely fall in the middle for fear of both camps.  they're just hoping the ones who want to burn it will come anyways for the event itself if nothing else.

 

I am attending more ITC events this year than i ever have.  Not because they are ITC.  No no no.  But I am because ITC is creating more tournaments FOR me to go to!  People.  This is a good thing.  But i think it is worth noting that just because the ITC has some positive effects does not mean it is above reproach and that those who question some of it should be treated as they often are. 

[fluger]

I definitely don't think the FAQ is above reproach, I just dislike the aspersions cast on the intent of the people who run it.  Having a disagreement over a ruling or a rule doesn't make the other person a scoundrel who is trying to pull a fast one.  I find that too many times when someone argues against a ruling and someone disagrees, the ad hominems come out...  There is no moral high ground in 40k, just a smattering of preferences and perspectives.  

[pretre]

ITC FAQ except x, y and z is even worse than no FAQ. Then the people complaining about having to read a big doc have to read even more and the people who just want to use the FAQ don't get to. Either use it or don't.

 

If you want ITC plus or minus, just write your own FAQ, otherwise it'll make more confusion.