How to Coach the Cheating out of You!

News broke today about cheating incident caught on stream for yet another high profile player. The player in particular was once a coach for Art of War coaching, who left the service before this particular episode happened, thankfully. It is safe to say, that competitive Warhammer 40k even in Covid is back to the same shitting shenanigans we have grown accustomed to. We can go over the “suspected” cheating, but all you have to do is read the linked thread and follow the video and it is pretty darn clear. This on top of reports of this particular player being a sore loser at other events. 

This particular player after leaving Art of War though decided it would be a good idea for him to make his own personal coaching service called Lords of Chaos. He is known for taking various Chaos lists to events, that specialize in finding obscure rule interactions to win games, this along with using the tried and true tactic of “gotchas”, while always dressed in 90s business ska casual. In fact, rumor has it, most of his coaching advice is about hiding rules from your opponent, which in most competitive circles is quite bad form. Chaos armies have always been the cesspool of these types of rules and tactics, so it comes as no surprised that the top Chaos player would use them. 

Competitive Warhammer 40k is a set of moving landmines for the players doing coaching. The pressure of winning games is always there, but to legitly win games becomes harder as the number of game rules you have to deal with grows exponentially as each edition evolves. Then you throw on top trying to make money player 40k, and you can see how quickly things would de-evolve. The easy solution is for any 40k coach to not play in the large events, the idea being that anyone who coaches should have enough street cred that they could quit the game and by name alone pull in clients. You know like other coaching services for any game or sport; think of Mister Miyagi or Patches O’ Houlihan. This of course won’t happen, because 40k players who have a few GT wins think they are God’s gift to the dice gods and can charge people for their thoughts. 

This monetization of Warhammer 40k is driving players and even hobbyists to extremes, so more cheating is just bound to happen. The only solution I can think of besides public cancelling of people, is to actually have large events enforce some rules, including limited bans. If only we had a global competitive Warhammer 40k structure that could possible regulate players? Oh, yeah there is this thing called ITC and even an mobile app Best Coast Pairings that could do the technical work. It wouldn’t take much for the most grievous cheaters to be banned for say 6 months to a 1 year, like Baseball does with steroids. This quickly incentivizes top players to keep things on the up and up; and BCP could suspend the player for entering events, so TOs wouldn’t have to track players like the FBI most wanted list. 

Of course, this won’t happen because BCP, ITC, and TOs have incentives to not step in because of potential backlash, especially if you ban the wrong player. As well, the Warhammer 40k community as a whole, just seems to hate confrontation unless it is between the little war dollies themselves. So this leaves maybe Games Workshop stepping in because, on a grand scale, people fear going to events because of the stories they hear about bad actors, and in theory GW is losing out on potential sales and from a marketing standpoint you don’t want your game to be known for it’s toxic players? This of course, won’t happen because GW loves to play above the fray and who knows what crazy solution they would come up with.

So we are left with once again the court of public opinion to keep on doing it’s job and shine a light on players doing bad things to win games. As always, I am always willing to climb up on my cross to bring attention to these sorts of things, but also sometimes miracles do happen…