Let me prefix this incoming rant by saying, I play 40k for fun. I am not a mean person. I am an asshole on the Internet or making fun of you when your not looking. The reason for that is simple; I small skinny white guy, meaning the vast majority of people can kick my ass. That being said, I made someone cry and quit a game over the weekend at a tournament. I only play in tournaments few times a year and always end up losing at least one game. My lists are sorta tooled out, but usually going for an extreme with a theme or unit selection. This time around I played an Iron Hands with six Dreadnoughts.
On the surface you may think the idea of six walkers are extra cheesy; well none were in drop pods and all were outfitted the same, which made them limited. The tournament had little over 60 players and was a three round affair. On display was your typical flair of competitive cheese, double lash, nob bikes, epi demon lists. It was funny that balanced Space Marine lists ended winning the big prizes. So anyway my first game was against a Dark Angel player with a very balanced list. In the proper hands it would of done well against any opponent. Sadly my opponent had hooks for hands.
The first sign of danger was the second I started pulling out my dreds, he looked over at them and sarcastically said, “that looks like a comp list”. He was referring to the fact, that one could get more points if an army had at least 40% troops. Dipshit did not know was 47% of my army was troops. If he bothered to look at my army he would of noticed the fully tooled out Tactical Squads everywhere. My second red flag, was by the time he failed to penetrate one of my dreds with three lascannons, he started swearing. Things progressively went down hill from there; the swearing increased, he started repeating himself, about how my army was not “comp”, and the tournament in general sucked. Then turn four rolls around and I destroy his Pred on a lucky roll with one of my dreds assault cannons. That send him over the edge and he threw his dice down and eyes started to water, then he quit. This guy was not 14 by the way, he was approaching his 40s and about five inches taller then me. Did he even know what the word tournament means? After looking around the room he might of thought people were going to take army building seriously?
Besides the fact that I made someone cry. Why would I post about someone being a douche? It had less to do with his behavior and had more to do with the fact he never played 5th ed before! This was not an isolated incidence, the last tourney a few months ago my first opponent again had not played 5th ed. What these two opponents had in common was they both fought me on a lot of rules. I have almost 100 5th ed games under my belt at this point, I think I know the rules pretty well. I am fine looking up rules anytime, but do not come all aggro, like I am trying to cheat you, when you did not take the fucking time to read them. What the fuck are you doing in a tournament anyway not having played one game of 5th ed? It is like playing a game of rugby a few times, then six months later go to Australia and play Footy for the first time.
This gets to my second point, a lot of people that do not know the rules, give other people that should be facing better competition an easy first win. Almost everyone would rather lose to a good player then table a piss poor one. A possible solution could be to turn away noobs, which is not a good idea. I think the non “national” tournaments really need to have players fill out a survey before the game to gauge the level of experience. That way the experienced players can play each other at least for the first round. I cannot think of a better idea.
One thing is forsure, if I am going to devote a whole day to a 40k tournament I do not want to spend all my games explaining all the differences between editions, I rather actually play the game.