This is not intended as a rant, but a constructive criticism of behavior that many online 40k personalities like to espouse. Besides sometimes the Internet gives you a gift that’s hard to pass up.

The Setup

  1. Player A dominates his local area one way or another,
  2. Player A embraces the Internet to boasts or uses blanket statements expressing his local experience and how it has informed him about the true nature of 40k meta.
  3. Player A creates an Internet persona builds up a rep through “witty” or “debate” driven comments.
  4. Player A after gaining enough notoriety creates a blog and proceeds to spread his personal 40k gospel.

On the surface this is fine and dandy. Where one can get into trouble is by combining sycophantic group think and micro personal experiences into universal truths about any aspect of Warhammer. Even still this doesn’t have to be a problem as long as the commentator acknowledges possible fallibility. Of course, not many of the 40k punditocracy  do, nor do they mention credentials or anything that would give us reason to believe what they say. Hence we get statements like Orks aren’t competitive; even if such statements were true I doubt any number of bloggers have the statistical or provable means to make it true. That sort of statement will always be subjective.

The Example

Here is a great example that illustrates a certain type of problematic subjective thinking that pops up often around the Internet.

Take a read…

http://theback40k.blogspot.com/2011/08/is-it-time-to-worry-yet.html

This article is filled with so many blanket statements based only on local meta, it made me (anyone else) wonder if the author and I were playing the same game. Still all could be forgiven if this article was written with some potential mea culpa. Now what happens when a newer player finds this blog and concludes that Nids and Dark Eldar are crappy. This is the danger of pretending to speak with authority about a subject without admitting your metro area isn’t the only place people can play 40k. The author does at certain points try couching his statements in some local context, but they don’t warn readers exactly where his premise is coming from. Instead we get a voice of “competitive gamers” like he somehow he speaks for “competitive gamers”.

People are free to post whatever they want on their own blogs, likewise anyone can respond. Either by correcting the author assumptions (many did in the comments) or the best way, by playing and proving assumptions wrong. This is why the best response I found was by a person that saw the article as a challenge and posted it on their blog.

Take a look…

http://hulksmash-homeplace.blogspot.com/2011/08/nova-invitational-open-my-mind-is-made.html

By seeing Tryanid injustice the author has taken upon himself to prove just how good (in the right hands) Tyranids can be. This is the exception to what most Internet informed players typically do by jump on whatever is the current bandwagon. No matter the talk of wanting just good competitive fights, it comes off more like just wanting to win and besides if Internet consensus says something is better, then by Jove why should I try something else?