The Difference Between Tournament Players and WAAC Douchebags

I was recently reminded of an article I had prepped for the 'Northern Wastes' blog, during the production of the next post, and to be honest the next one is taking rather a long time to process. So in the meantime I thought I would have a little rant here regarding the perception of tournament players.

Now for some context, this was around about Adepticon when Nick Nanavati won it with his Flying Monstrous Creature list. An article detailing this appeared on Bell of Lost Souls and of course this was advertised on Facebook. This post was then commented on by one of my friends and Welsh ETC player Mr Mike Collins so - ever interested in the American meta and their circuit - I decided to take a look.

Now I am well aware of the infamous commentors over there known as the 'BoLS Trolls', but to be honest I feel that no matter whether they are trolling or not, this is an opinion shared by a large chunk of the community, especially online. But to be perfectly honest, this was just in the Facebook comments, not even on the main sight.

The general sentiment given was that Nick is a prick (that exact word was used) and a WAAC douchebag for taking such a bent list and winning a tournament with it, and that a chimp could win a tournament with it. And I have a few problems with this.

Now I'm not here to defend Nick personally, hell I've heard stories that he's a pretty cool guy but I've never met him and I only heard the stories after my initial disappointment with the community so it had no impact whatsoever.

Firstly, it is worth pointing out that the expectations of what you're going to face at a tournament and what you're going to face at your local store or - if you are commenting with such tripe on a public space - in your mum's basement, are completely different. At tournaments, the fun is in going up against the best players with the best lists and giving them a tough game, the fun is in the puzzle of how to win the game and working out the best strategy and tactics for each scenario, not in turning up, sitting around for 40 minutes carelessly removing your beautifully painted models from a table courtesy of the titan in the apocalypse game, before spending another 40 minutes doing the same to your opponent. If you want to get pissed and throw dice around, to each their own, but you have no right to impose how you enjoy to play the game and your expectations of what you should face on others.

Therefore, you can guarantee that the vast majority of the 256 people in the room will also have attempted to bring the strongest list they can. Sure, if you're going to compare one optimally efficient list with your 'little bit of everything' Tyranid list, it's probably going to be an unbalanced game because the tournament list is clearly the more efficient. But then when you compare it with a list built for a similar purpose, suddenly it's a bit closer, and that's the entire point. You are all striving for the same goal of winning the tournament and that's the fun of it.

So when you have a room full of 256 armies all built to be as strong as possible, how can you possibly say that you could take the same list and win the tournament 100% guaranteed without being a crazy good player. In my opinion, I don't think that there is anyone in North America that could  say that, and I even think that in Europe it's a stretch (if you want to compare NA with EU in 40k I have tonnes of ammunition to say that EU players are stronger, I don't think it's even a discussion). The fact that you would even believe such a thing shows how much exposure you have to tournament play, and that is absolutely zero. You don't understand the concept of relative balance and you don't understand the fact that beating up random 12 year olds on vassal with the curtains closed does not make you an ETC calibre player. It just makes you a borderline paedophile with a messiah complex.

This brings me to my point regarding WAAC players and tournaments. Anyone reading this who has ever made a comment relating to tournament players being dicks, I urge you. Go to a tournament. I don't even mean a local one where you might know some of the guys, I mean a big tournament, with loads of strangers, and tell me that you had a bad time. Yeah, occasionally you might get the one insecure guy pretending to be good who is kind of an arsehole but no more than 1 a tournament. I have been going to these things since 2012, and I have only run into one individual who I would truely call a hateful human being.

Sure, tournament players are trying to win their games, but the at all costs bit is extremely steep. There is no point winning unless you can do it fairly, otherwise you are just proving the point that you do not believe you can beat the opposing player without cheating your way to it or sapping all of the fun out of the game. And that's what this hobby is about at the end of the day, fun. We have recently had the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks in France, something that has hit me as it is in an industry that I will work in in 4 months time. The entire point of that is down to freedom of speech, and that by extension means freedom of political, religious (or lack thereof) and philosophical views provided they do not mean the taking of human life.

This is a vast hobby, with multiple avenues to explore, so please, make sure you educate yourself on a topic before you judge it.

Year Behind, Year Ahead

Despite the fact that this blog has been dormant for the last year, I'm still pretty ok with how the year has gone. To be honest it's been a bit of a wake up call. I came out of 2013 with my first bits of tournament experience under my belt and thinking that I was 'the big dog', and to be honest, in the first 8 months of this year I really felt I was progressing, and I was playing the best 40k I had ever played by the end of it, but in the grand scheme of things I was no where near winning anything and was very much a middle of the pack player. Finishing consistently top half, but now occasionally giving ETC players good practice, winning my first ever awards outside of sportsmanship (well, physically, I still count the doubles at the end of October 2013 as a tourney win, there's a rant back there somewhere), and striving forward in the scene.

Then 7th hit, I started to get more and more into PC gaming, 3rd year University hit, and I reverted back to complete scrub status.

So what am I looking to achieve in the next year. First and foremost I want a trophy. Not a certificate. I want a big ass cup on my mantlepiece, and a KR case with a label on it. I don't care if it's 20 man, my aim is to win it. I don't want to be in mid table obscurity anymore, and the step to that is to stop playing like I belong there. I'm giving myself until the GT finale to get my form from the end of 6th back, and then I intend to press on, getting any games I can and playing against ETC calibre players at every opportunity, as I also want to make a serious push on the England team for the 2016 season.

As for the blog, I have been wanting to rebrand for a while now. The original name came from my forum alias which is really both far less known than my real name on the tournament circuit and far worse as a name than my IGN on PC. I've also grown up a lot these days, and the players and forums I used to beg for advice from are now my equals all over the world and 9 year old Jimmy down the club. I may press on with this in the next few months, the site name is also likely to change so keep your eyes peeled for that but all the content should still be up there.

Anyway guys, thanks for sticking with me. I've got some exciting things that will be coming up at the end of next month, so prepare yourselves, the next year is going to be exciting....

In the last 6 months I...

In June 2013 'Wargaming with Rampage' hit a peak, almost making 5,000 reads in a single month. Since then, I have struggled for motivation, and this has been all too evident in the crappy content that I have put out since. This has at part been due to University, partly due to my growing League of Legends addiction, and partly due to the fact that I no longer feel I need to validate myself by posting maths on the internet and hoping no-one complains. A good example of the latter is Blackmoor's blog, not much content been going up on there since he's been on the 11th company (just kidding I'm not Blackmoor (I'm better than that guy (bring it Blackmoor! (Just not on Vassal I play really badly on that system)))).

So, in short what have I been up to in the last 6 months. Well, I went to the GT heats, was sick in a gutter and missed out on automatic qualification by 1 slot because people didn't turn up for day 2. However I still got through courtesy of 'Best Chaos Marine player at heat', and then turned up at the final in March and claimed best CSM player in that too, despite being docked points for not being able to write lists properly.

In January I went to the Caledonian Uprising, where I bagged my first top half finish, again using my prized Chaos Space Marine army. 2 weeks ago I decided to pick up Necrons for the first time and take them to an escalation tournament. Which I then flopped at because I wrote a really bad list. And then last week I went to the War of the Roses, a 2 day tournament in which I only lost one game, albeit because I made a stupid mistake but still only one game, which I was happy with, making me a more consistent top 50% player.

In addition, I have been heading to the England squad days and weekends on a regular basis, helping the 9 out and getting some top level experience, which has served me very well in the last couple of big events.

In short, I'm really looking forward to get back into blogging, not for my own self validation or for an ego boost, but because I enjoy writing, and with the game getting shaken up so much in the next couple of weeks, things are going to get interesting.

Brothers in Arms - Tournament Report and an Explanation

I haven't played a game of 40k since 28th October, but despite my lack of effort in getting back into playing, I'd like to write a bit more. As such, here is a tournament report from the last event that I went to. It was a doubles tournament, with 750pts per player.

Champions of Chaos - What's the problem?

Certainly in the gaming groups that I play in, one of the most complained about thing by other Chaos Players is the Champions of Chaos special rule. This is a rule that is given to all characters, and it has 2 effects. Firstly, you must challenge and you must always accept challenges. Secondly, if you beat down an enemy character a combat, you roll on the Chaos Boons table, which can give you many 'rewards'. But why is it so hated?

Short Hiatus

This is more of an announcement than a post. Over the last couple of months I haven't exactly been churning out the content, this has been down to a number of factors, and if I said it was down to any one of them that would be a lie. In Sheffield I live in the suburbs. My nearest stores are half an hour bus ride away, and my nearest club is about the same distance driving. Because I work in a pub, my work days fall around the weekend and occasionally in the week as well, meaning that I'm not able to get to the club or stores as much for games due to the short amount of time that I will have left. This has essentially meant that I have played 1 singles game since mid-July.

There is only so much theory-hammer that one can occupy oneself with, and as this blog is mostly theory-hammer, it has suffered a little due to me attempting to pass the time at work theory-hammer-ing. The long and the short of it is that recently I've become a little disillusioned with the hobby as a whole recently, so I'm going to be taking a break from the pressure of trying to get content up here for a little while, just until I've re-inthused myself.

If you were to ask me how long this would be that would actually be a pretty simple question to answer. I go back to Oxford on Saturday 14th September, once I am starting to get more games on a more regular basis (I'm aiming for at least 5 during Fresher's week alone) then I should be back to regular posting (which in the past hasn't been particularly regular but you get the point), so I'm looking to aim for updating every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. I have no idea exactly what I'm going to be doing here for that period of time, but it's likely that it will be something tournamenty. Until then.

Fabius Vs Abaddon

I know that this is a bit of a strange post, firstly it comes straight out of left field among all of the tournament reports and Eldar analysis posts, however I said I'd do it so here it is. I recently got into a debate with some guys on Facebook regarding Fabius and Abaddon. The original notion being that Abaddon made Fabius look good. I disagreed, and flew straight into my basic argument stance. Write so many words that people cannot be bothered to read it and I win by default (actually I employed the same tactic in my A Level Computing Coursework a couple of years back, 1,500 pages and over 500,000 words). However, when the obvious of not reading the post was stated, I promised to post it as a Blog article and link it in, breaking it down into sizable chunks. So here it is.

Is Dual Force Org Bad? - A Response

I thought I'd do something a little different for the last post of 2012. Therefore I'm going to be doing a response to something that was posted earlier in the year.

The post that I'm going to be replying to is from a very famous 40k blog. 'Yes the truth hurts' run by Stelek, and although it is extremely unlikely that he reads this poky little blog, I'd like to make my point anyway. I disagree with Stelek 99% of the time, but I've picked this post in relation to the fact that at its core it regards the big 40k news for the year. I could have gone with the whole, 'Forge World in tournaments' debate, but as it stands I haven't attended a single Forge World allowing tournament, and so have a lack of experience, although I do have 3 of them lined up in the next 2 months.

I'm not going to link to the post in question here, but if you go to Yes the Truth Hurts and enter '2 FOC is bad' you'll get the post. It came out a week after 6^th edition, and so was probably a bit hasty and a bit full of nerd rage but that's no excuse for a poorly thought out argument, especially from such a well known blog and especially when you're going to use demeaning and offensive language to describe anyone that doesn't agree with your proposition.

Onto the subject of this post, as you may have probably guessed, the proposition made by Stelek is that dual force org is bad for the game. By this, we mean the rule that states that once a game reaches 2,000pts or more, you double the number of force organisation slots available to you. You now have access to 4 HQ choices, 6 Elites, and so on.

He begins the article with the following introduction,

'Here are some broken lists.

Are the Unbeatable at 2k?

Well, you tell me.'

He then ends the post with,

'Seriously, you thought 40k5e was boring?

Play against any of these armies and your brain will shut right off'

During the article, he then proceeds to create lists for 4 different army books, all of which he deems broken by telling the reader what they will think when they face them across the table. Those who agree with him, also post more of these 'broken' lists, often using different Codecies, in the comments section of the post. Now here's the hypocrisy.

Let's say that the dual force org Space Wolves army that he has built plays against the dual force org Ork army from the same article. This is a perfectly legitimate situation, as in a dual force org 2,000pt game both armies have access to the dual force org. Now, if these 2 lists come against each other are they both still unbeatable?

Now let's assume that all Codecies have the potential to make what Stelek defines has, 'unbeatable' combinations using the double force org, and let's say that you're at an extremely competitive 2,000pt tournament that allows double force organisation, or you're in the top bracket of a GT in the U.S which is allowing double force org, and everyone has brought one of these lists. Are they all still unbeatable? Does this mean that no-one will win any games, and no-one will lose any games? Does every game result in a draw?

Of course it doesn't. I am always very hasty before labelling a unit, a Codex, or a list as broken. This is because if everything in a room is broken, then nothing is. If you have 2 armies that are broken fighting against each other, are they still both broken within the context of that game? No they are not, they cancel each other out. Sure, the game may be a better match up for one army than the other, but lists don't have to be broken for this to apply. You can turn up to a fluffy tournament with your fluffy list and play against another fluffy list, with your list essentially able to cope with your opponents better than your opponent's is able to cope with yours, but does that make your list any more broken? No, it means it's a good match up.

In the same way, in a room full of 'broken' lists, because dual force org has been enabled, is your list still broken? Broken can generally be defined (in my opinion, feel free to disagree with me) as so powerful that it ruins the game for your opponent. If you have 2 of these lists pitched against each other then they are evenly matched, and so are not ruining the game for your opponent and so are not broken or unbeatable.

If you have a dual force org list playing against a list that is only allowed 1 force organisation chart, sure the dual force org list has a huge advantage. But at the end of the day, this is never going to be the case. In the same way, if you wanted to play a triple force organisation game, and both armies are subjected to this, go for it, you're both subjected to the same restrictions, or lack thereof.

I realise that I'm probably repeating myself here so I'm going to wrap this up.

My favourite quote from the article is a comment that is left by Stelek himself, and it reads,

'No, 2 FOC is just bad. Period. There are no ifs.'

Making an absolute statement that dual force org is bad for the game with no evidence to support this claim other than posting a number of army lists that would be evenly matched against each other is not a strong argument.

If everyone's army list is 'unbeatable', nobody's is.