Army Lists, and a Re-Blog – Competitive vs. Casual, the Endless Debate

I’m going to try to convince people to stop using the words Casual and Competitive.

I’m going to do this by using them repeatedly for an entire, long article.

If I could give anyone I know a single piece of advice in life, it would be to live a life without expectations. If I could give someone a second piece of advice, it would be to establish goals instead.

The notion of “expectation” plays out heavily throughout our hobby. It impacts how our games pan out, how we play, how we feel about our games, and dramatically impacts our collective outlook on the hobby itself.

Lately, expectations are coming into play again with an upsurge in the perceived conflict between “Competitive” and “Casual” in Warhammer 40k. It bears understanding right from the get-go that these words are both awful words to use; we use them wrong, and we use them wrong routinely … they’re imprecise and highly subjective. More importantly, they cause serious problems in our community, because they detract from the real issues we often see causing conflict. They imprecisely and inaccurately rebrand these problems as a conflict of culture instead of a conflict caused by unrealistic and selfish expectations.

So let’s break some things down that need discussion …

As soon as you call something a Tournament and establish wins, losses, ties and scores for performance (whether that performance is “Did you win?” or “Was your opponent’s list cheesy in your expert opinion?” or “How attractive is your army compared to everyone else’s?”), you’ve created a Competition. A competition need not be competitive, but competitiveness is largely beyond the control of the organizer in contemporary 40k.

It’s time to take you guys to the mystical realm of ANALOGYLAND (which is apparently a real place). If you host a five-round one-on-one street basketball tournament in which the first round is randomly paired and the participants are Kobe Bryant in his prime, Michael Jordan in his prime, and 30 identically cloned people with dwarfism … is it competitive? We know it’s a competition … after all, it’s a five-round streetball tournament. Your initial thought might be “This isn’t competitive,” since we can probably guess Kobe and MJ are going to face each other at some point (not necessarily in the final round as would make sense, since the first round is randomly paired), and are otherwise going to run roughshod over a bunch of poor little people.

You’d be wrong.

In every round save for the first, 14 of the 16 games played are going to be practical mirror matches in terms of size and athleticism. The excepted round will have 16 highly competitive games, because at some point either Kobe or MJ are going to have to face each other … it’s a five-round tournament and there are 32 players, and we can safely assume neither of them is going to lose to a dwarf. So while theoretically eight games are going to be highly unfair and not competitive (the four rounds in which MJ and Kobe are beating up on the little people, and not facing each other), 72 games are going to be exceptionally competitive. So even though 30 of the 32 players never had a chance to win, the event itself is incredibly competitive, with 72 of 80 games likely to be very closely contested, with no clear guess at a winner ahead of time. Plus, the game to determine the overall winner (Kobe vs. MJ, whenever it happens) is also going to be very competitive (let’s avoid Kobe vs. MJ debates and assume they’d be similar enough in their respective primes).

A far less competitive event would be one in which the field is incredibly diverse. Host the same tournament with the same random first round pairings, yet change the field to MJ and Kobe, a handful of the little people, and then a full spectrum of basketball players from grade school, junior high and high school, college, the pros and retiree leagues. This event is far less likely to be even remotely competitive, because the ability to actually pair up evenly matched individuals becomes more difficult … and you still know going into it who is likely to wind up at or near the top by the end.

The second example represents all of today’s major 40k tournaments, from the Feast of Blades and NOVA Invitational all the way through most local Rogue Trader tournaments. You won’t find any event that is even remotely competitive. You’ll find plenty of events that are well-designed, fair competitions.

There’s another point, by the way. I’ll wager no one reading this wondered about the rules of basketball while pondering the whimsy of the above examples. Nobody was sitting there thinking, “3-pointers are overpowered; I wonder if any of the old guys will bring those to their game.” Perceived and real imbalances in 40k create yet another layer of “Come on guys, none of these tournaments are competitive.”

You, the reader, represent one of the people in the second tournament example above. Just like that example, when you attend a Tournament you are competing. You are in a competition. Your likelihood of getting a bunch of competitive games isn’t necessarily very high. Your likelihood of successfully winning games is directly proportional to your metrics; while for MJ the key factors were his skill and physical attributes, for you it’s your skill and army attributes.

In all of these cases, skill and army … or skill and physicality … are independent of personality. They are independent of “competitive spirit” and “sociability” and “fun-lovingness.”

The world is full of competitively elite people who are superjerks, and competitively elite people who are wonderful human beings. Cal Ripken, Jr. isn’t an awesome human being because he played a ton of consecutive baseball games.

The world is also full of competitively incompetent a**holes, and competitively incompetent angels. Kim Jong-un isn’t a horrible ornery a**hole because of his poor hangtime.

But I’m getting off course. There’s a paradigm in our hobby of trying to brand people as being “one or the other,” “competitive vs. casual,” and other similar brandings.

I hope we’ve by now completely abolished the horrible use of the word “competitive” when referring to 40k tournaments. They aren’t, and IMO they never will be. There are too few events, too diverse a set of codices, too rapid a series of changes to those codices and too many players spread across too large a land area. Until we have a seeded event for only the best players (and look, I think the NOVA Invitational gets close, but it’s still fairly diverse in skill and army level), we’re never going to have a remotely competitive 40k event.

Stop thinking yours is. I’m talking to you, Mike Brandt of the NOVA Open. I’m talking to you, Chandler Lee of the Feast of Blades. I’m talking to you, Reece Robbins of the Bay Area Open. Whoever. Until we want to shoot ourselves in the financial foot and only let in a tiny handful of people we know are “good,” and then just to be sure, QC their lists with an independent commission to make sure none of them are being dummies and taking something that’s trying too hard to be different … we’ll never have a truly competitive event. Furthermore, calling someone “competitive” makes no sense whatsoever. I’ve faced many local heroes who are considered competitive dudes by their local crews … and crushed them. Does that mean they are or aren’t competitive? Just … STOP using the word. Try “good at 40k,” or “He has an optimized list,” or “He a bad man!!!” Those, at least, are all aware of their own subjectivity.

What we all do have, by the way, are fair competitions with fair rules in which people have a fair shot to prove how good they are (at painting, gaming, being good people in the eyes of those with whom they interact, or all three combined somehow).

So … moving on to the word “casual.”

What does it mean?

The closest I can see any of these getting to how our hobby community tries to use it is the fourth definition, but it’s still …. just awful as a way to try and brand someone.

I call tell you, the people out there desperately crying for comp or “casual” events are very, very concerned, and aren’t even a little bit relaxed. I can tell you none of them seem to play 40k irregularly. We can skip the clothing definition …

There are other uses for “casual,” as funny as that is. There’s also a great deal of thought and premeditation going into trying to brand “Competitive vs. Casual” subsets of players, and then trying to add qualitative value to whom each “side” is as human beings.

I’m a casual player. OH YEAH I DID. Am I concerned with the outcome of a tournament or game I attend? Not particularly. Am I relaxed when I play? Most opponents would probably argue stridently “yes,” especially when making cocktails for opponents and myself (as at Battle for Salvation: Lavender Bitters + Citadelle Gin + Q Tonic, yessir!). I played about four games of 40k in the two+ months leading up to BFS. Sounds fairly irregular to me. Less than once every two weeks. Less than twice a month. I do occasionally wear fancier clothes while playing … but that’s usually because I just got home from work. I often scribble out a list to play against my opponents on the spot, the moment I get home, with … well, without much thought or premeditation.

Yet I’m not who the Branders are thinking of when they say “casual.” (Oh yeah, I just branded the Branders, sue me.)

Who are they thinking of? Bad players? Players who try really hard to build a list they don’t think is “competitive” (there’s that stupid word again). Players who … don’t care if they win? Wait, can’t go there … lots of the “competitive” guys don’t care if they win either, despite bringing strong lists and playing well.

I think what gets me is that it’s the opposite of casual to try and stovepipe or brand people who share the same hobby as being a certain way. There are a lot of players who are anything but casual, but for whatever reason (more power to them) don’t want to play what is considered an optimal list, and don’t want to spend much energy within their games playing to win. That’s OK. I don’t fully understand it personally, because I’ve always found myself able to engender positive relationships with all sorts of player types while playing the game as it is supposed to be played and bringing whatever list I want to bring … the exact definition of a casual player.

The truth of the matter is we all need to take it a little less seriously, and remember that it is a game. When you sit down to play Apples to Apples, or Trivial Pursuit, or Pictionary … you give it your best shot at playing the game correctly and to win … you congratulate those who do well … you laugh at the fun things that happen … and you generally care not all that much about the outcome. You certainly don’t look at that guy next to you who is answering all the Trivial Pursuit questions correctly and say

The long and short of this long-winded retort to the Branders of our little hobby world is this:

Kim Jong-un sucks at basketball (I’m just sure of it), and also sucks at life. Cal Ripken, Jr. is pretty awesome at life, and awesome at baseball. I think most of us use the words “casual” and “competitive” incorrectly, but we all know what players mean when they try to brand people as being one or the other.

And it’s still wrong.

There are as many overly intense, unpleasant people who play 40k poorly or with fluffy / underpowered lists as there are overly intense, unpleasant people who play 40k well and with optimized or overpowered lists.

Drop your expectations when going into public gaming settings (local game stores, tournaments, etc.), and be open and aware of your own needs. Avoid games that are too far outside your skill and list level, and if you put yourself in games that are outside your skill and list level … understand and accept responsibility for the fact that’s exactly where you’ve put yourself. You aren’t a “casual player” stuck facing a bunch of “competitive players.” You aren’t a competitive player forced to get his practice in against “casual newbies.” We’re all different, we all share traits and differ in all sorts of variable ways, and we’re all playing a silly little game. Obsessing over throwing a diverse group of human beings into a couple of hyper-generic, grammatically intoxicated buckets is probably the last thing any of us should be doing.