Friday Night Internet Fight: Round 47

Blaine sent me a link to this thread almost 3 weeks ago and I’ve been saving it for a special occasion, such as today.  What you’re about to see is a thread about Razorback weapons on Warseer that starts out amicably and then rides right off the rails for no real reason.  It also gets closed in the end for no real reason.  One of the fight participants even appears to be banned now, but probably not from this thread.  If anybody does know where Pringles got banned though, let me know.  Seriously, what is up with the Warseer admins.  First my alter ego gets multiple warnings for having an “offensive” screen name – yeah then why did you filter allow it if it’s so fucking profane, TKE gets banned, and now this. (more…)

GW Acknowledges WAAC Gamers; The First Rule Can Suck My Balls

Yesterday GW’s What’s New Today Blog, home of a daily dose of pretty pictures and no useful hobby information, acknowledged and possibly defined what a WAAC gamer is.  If you read far enough into the 9/22/10 Throne of Skulls Survival Guide, you would have run into the following after being bored to tears by the most obnoxious survival guide ever:

the temptation to play to win at all cost can overtake the best of us. However, any unscrupulous play will not earn you many friends and may eventually lead to retribution. If you can’t swim I’d be extra friendly just to be on the safe side

There you have it, a WAAC player, according to a published GW contributor, is unscrupulous (a cheater) and acts like a dick. There is no mention whatsoever of bringing a good list, playing by the rules as written, or playing a tight, hard game (no homo, not that there’s anything wrong with that). So everyone that I’ve argued with in comments threads, forums, FNIF’s, my mind, in person, or whatever can officially fuck off. Invoking the first rule (have fun, or some bullshit) is likely to earn you a swift kick (or maybe a kwik kick) to your shriveled little testicles. Playing a good game with a good list does not make you a WAAC gamer; being a jerkoff and ruining somebody’s “fun” does.

The Continuing saga of the DJ

Haven’t written since Monday, for which I do apologize.  Basically I have been sleeping since then after what started out as the first really bad seasonal allergy attack I’ve had in years turned into a wicked summer cold.  Watching the mucus pouring from every orifice on my face slowly turn from clear (allergies) to green and brown (cold) over the last few days has been great.  So, not feeling the energy to blog, I just kept active on a few conversations regarding the would allocation explosion.

I think I’ve made my thoughts on the matter quite clear, giving specific reasons I don’t feel that iamaddj’s opinion was valid, but will recognize him for being a surprisingly good sport .  Other’s have said that it doesn’t matter if his opinion is good or bad, it’s sparking a discussion.  These people will then reference the now 500+ comments on the original BoLS article.  Comment count is all well and good, but much like post count in a forum, it doesn’t necessarily indicate validity or show that people are thinking.  One needs to actually go and read the comments to see what type of discussion is going on.  Dive into that thread and you’re going to mostly see people trolling each other and making fun of the post.  Great discussion there.  Now a few people do agree with the OP and voice some concern about the rule.  Again, I made my points very clear regarding slowing the game down, being realistic, etc so I will just say that everyone is entitled to their own dumbass, wrong opinion.

To catch up on the drama Check out the links below.  I also understand that TKE will soon be making his triumphant return to blogging after his holiday (or vacation if you speak American) with a never before seen quadruple snowmobile of the offending post.  I think a new name is warranted for this feat.  I suggest the triple Lindy.

Kirby snowmobiles iamaddj

Mkerr snowmobiles the lot of them

…and to answer your impending question, no I don’t know what FNIF is going to be yet.  I probably won’t decide until right before I publish it.

U Mad DJ?

Looks like it’s two misses in a row for one of the newer BoLS writers.  Here’s hoping for a 3rd strike, resulting in him being thrown off the site.  From the man who brought us the tale of chicken little explaining quite erroneously how the new* concept of true line of site is killing warhammer, we get a wonderfully terrible write up of why wound allocation is ruining the game.  Seriously, if there are so many forces conspiring against your ability to enjoy the game, maybe you should just quit.

Imaddj is quickly becoming one of my favorite BoLS writers, for all the wrong reasons.  To begin with we’ve got the name.  What’s up with that seriously?  Is he a ddj?  Is he a mad dj that can’t use verbs?  I won’t speculate any further beyond that. 

Last week, as I mentioned, he vomited the worst article about TLOS ever written all over the interwebs.  I think a lot of you were expecting me to say something about that, but sometimes an article is just too obviously bad or has already been beaten to death.  In that case, both were true.  So I’m not going to say anything about it other than that it was factually inaccurate, had admittedly made up statistics presented as fact, and tried too hard to be cute.  The inaccuracies were probably the worst part of the whole thing.  Somebody (it may have even been the author- no fucking way I’m wading through 400 comments to find it again) said that, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘opinion pieces don’t need to be factually accurate.’  Worst argument ever.  Opinion pieces especially should be based on fact.  The absence of fact in opinion is what has created things like the tea party here in the states. 

Having just been posted, I think it’s early enough for me to get a good whine in about his newest article, Wound Allocation- cheating with loopholes?, though.  God I hate it when titles have question marks in them.  It’s the biggest most trite douche bag move of all time.  I also hate it when somebody makes sweeping generalizations about something that is “new” to the game that is actually a mechanic that is now going on 2 years old.

Now here’s what we’re going to do.  Rather than go through and snowmobile the whole thing, which I could do, I’m just going to hit his major bullet points and refute them- with profanity!  Fuck yeah! 

Time to get this going since I think my intro will be longer than the rest of the article…..

Wound allocation was supposed to help the shooter
Guess what dickhead, it still does in most cases.  Just to make sure I’m not talking out of my ass, I even grabbed my 4th ed rulebook to look up the old casualty removal rules.  If you still have the book, they start on page 26, if you want to reference them at any point.  Under the old system, the owner of the target unit (or catcher, receiver, bottom, power bottom or whatever else you’d like to call him) decides which models to remove or give wounds to.  Sgt. with a power fist?  Multi-melta?  Flamer?  Well looks like you’ll have 7 other bodies to wade through before any of them die.  Those special weapons will pretty much always be around to haunt you, until the unit is removed entirely.  Now, if you torrent the shit out of a unit, there’s a chance for all those toys to go away earlier, helping out the shooter.  Can it be abused?  Well of course, just like most rules it can be in extreme circumstances.  For reference see FNIF round 22 about stretching termagants across the board.  Good thing there aren’t many opportunities in the game to do this.  Really nob bikers and shooting units with weapons with differing AP are the only things that come to mind immediately.  As you’ll see later there are even good arguments behind why the AP rules make sense in 5th. 

Many People don’t actually use wound allocation
Sweet, more sweeping generalizations made up from a representative sample of n=0.  Fuck off.  If you’re not using this rule, you’re playing not 40k, plain and simple.  It’s a fundamental rule, you can’t skip it.  Sure people fuck up and get antsy and just start removing casualties sometimes, but this really isn’t even worth discussing.  Next!

Wound allocation slows the game down
Yes it does, thanks for sharing captain obvious of the obvious task force to point out the obvious.  Good thing that many other changes to the fundamentals of 40k, like TLOS and vehicle damage charts, speed things up.  I think the game still plays more quickly overall, but hey that’s just my opinion based on a lot of research that I didn’t do.  Sometimes a change is needed in a rule to make it more fair (which I think it is- again, see my made up research study) even if it takes a little longer.  Plus, when you get down to it, he never raises the point that the new rule, while slower, is actually less complicated than the old one.  No more of this ‘if the unit takes a number of wounds equal to or greater than the number of models in the unit, the firer may select one casualty’ bullshit.  Fuck that!  I’ll take more straightforward rule without a ‘see subclause 1c’ situation any day of the week.

Wound allocation actually helps the target, not the shooter?
Good job repeating the inverse of your first topic (since we’re all about math and statistics today that would be topic A^-1).  Back to writing 101 for you.  Everything I said above still applies here.  At least this time we get some concrete examples- nob bikers, of course, and an AP situation. He calls this cheating.  Note, it’s not cheating if it’s allowed by the rules, dipshit.  Now specifically regarding the AP situation, we are given a unit of 6 marines that takes 6 plasma and 6 lasgun wounds.  Imaddj is confused about why 3 men could absorb all 6 plasma shots.  He says it isn’t realistic.  Is it more realistic to consider that all 6 shots hit a different target?  That must be one ace trick shooter.  I’ve found that when playing a game with plastic toy soldiers it’s best to have an imagination.  This might help you make it through the hobby imaddj.  Until you do manage to loosen up, though, please stop writing.

====================================================================
*and by new I mean 2 years old.  Get used to it people, we’re well into 5th edition.  Learn to suck less and get ready for 6th in 3-5 years so you can have something new to complain about.

Hypocrite of the Week; Project Mayhem

Somebody was kind enough to send me a link to this BoLS article, so that I might witness a the trip into the depths of hell that is the comments section. 
The article itself is a pretty banal, slow news day style article.  I actually feel sort of bad for Goatboy for having to write this.  It’s a shame that somebody with some actual tactical sense and list building prowess continually gets the “let’s go check out the baby pandas at the zoo” assignments or the “vague open ended editorial to drive page views via inflammatory comments” style assignments. 

Now there’s a ton of shit  that I could pick on in the article or the comments section.  Fuck, there’s more stupidity than I could shake a stick at.  I’ll try and keep this short, though.  I’m tired and it’s noisy in my house* right now.  Anybody remember Zingbaby from FNIF, Round 17?  No?  Well here are some things that he said a few weeks ago:

“I’m not having any trouble with any list personally…

…and again for the last time, for yet another retard that can’t read – I’m not losing to those lists and that is the farthest thing from my beef… but I’m certain you have too much Pwonage$$ to understand what I’m saying here anyway”

Arrogant, pompous, boastful, aggressive, and stupid- what’s not to love?  Well that was about 3 weeks ago now.  Let’s see what his tune is this week:

“I rarely win with my army, but I always have fun… and I know I could make a more efficient list and likely win more if I wanted to. “

Well have fun being a huge fucking hypocrite.  It sucks when somebody uses your own words to make you look like an ass.  This is why Internet anonymity is stupid.  You can say just about anything you want to about yourself without the risk of being fact checked**- I created the Internet, John Holmes was my father, and I own a Caribbean Island- one of the major ones. 

With that in mind, your homework for the week is to either fuck with Zingbaby*** or make the most ludicrous boast you can think of on a forum or blog.  Send me your results along with your screen name, a picture proving you are not Tom Kiryb#, and a link to wherever the mayhem has ensued to sodoffdethtron@gmail.com .  The funniest posts will be featured here over the weekend, unless I don’t get any submissions again.

=================================================================
*our handyman of dubious citizenship status is installing a garbage disposal.  Haven’t had one of these in many many years.  I’m excited.

**unless your name is stelek, of course

***Now, I am not encouraging you to go out there and post his real identity and address and then send pizzas to him or male prostitutes or anything, but if that did happen, I’d lol.

# This only applies to Kirby.  All others do not have to send in a picture unless they want to.

« Previous Entries