Boom Shaka-Laka.
Apologies in advance for the tough talk.
I wasn’t really aware of the apparent frustration with the Las Vegas Open’s final results because the only article I had read on it was on BoK, and he seemed cool with it. And while half the top 8 were Eldar, they weren’t the same exact list, and there was a fair representation of other lists in there, and other netlist-boogeymen like Taudar and Screamerstar were absent. Seems pretty healthy to me.
But if you poke around the internet you’ll find there is the usual hair-tearing happening about 40k being “broken”, and I always chuckle about people who get so angry about how 40k needs “fixing”.
Here’s what I don’t understand about the vocal minority in the competitive community that likes to complain so much about things like “balance” and “cheese”. The very basis of any competitive environment is becoming as strong, skilled and efficient as you can be in order to dominate your competition. It is also, by extension, about finding and exploiting every advantage that a given system will allow for. The guy who won the Las Vegas Open did all of this; he played well, and he obviously had a very strong list that was within the legal boundaries of what was allowed. I applaud him for it. I’m also glad I didn’t have to face a single one of those top 8 lists, but that’s why I don’t go to tournaments.
So I’m directly asking you competitive players out there who are reading this: Are you in it to win it, or are you in it to have fun? If you’re in it to win it, I don’t really see what there is to complain about. Every player enters a tournament under the same set of limitations as every other player. If you’re curb-stomped, you probably mis-read the meta when building your list, or you played poorly. If you’re frustrated that the only army you own and can afford can’t compete in the current meta, welcome to the inherent limitations of all asymmetrical competitive environments.
I like using Magic: the Gathering for a convenient point of reference. If you are going to a top-level Magic tournament with thousands of players and you bring the wrong deck, no amount of superior play is going to get you to the top spot. Competitive Magic players understand that, and they routinely switch up decks that can cost around a grand to buy if it will give them an advantage. Yet somehow competitive 40k players expect that all armies are always going to be competitively viable. It’s an expectation that we are unique as a community in expecting from a game system.
However, if you’re in it to have fun, try playing 40k in a different context. There are plenty of non-competitive events out there where you can get lots of games in and meet new people (some of the most cited reasons people claim they attend competitive events); they are called campaigns, and if I’m not mistaken, most big 40k conventions have those as well. The goal there is to have fun. Not to win. Look, we all like winning, but there are winners and losers in campaigns as well, so you’re in luck! The difference is that the winning and losing has a context, which is why GW is so up in our face about the whole “forging a narrative” thing. The game, to the people who make it, just doesn’t have the same meaning when it’s stripped of context. That’s why they allow for things like the Allies Matrix; they expect that when people respect the spirit of the game it will enhance narrative possibilities. GW is currently in the process of gearing up to have company-sanctioned campaign events at select stores; that’s what they are doing instead of having company-sanctioned tournaments, because that is what the game is meant for.
So, for the people out there who are still wishing that GW would razor-balance their game, don’t expect the game to be something it’s not and you’ll never be disappointed.