Honestly, the complexity of the rule set was one of the things that drew me to the game in the first place. So while I see where that could be a barrier to people who aren't attracted to that type of thing, I don't necessarily see that as something I want to see changed. So I'm not sure why the things that casual players enjoy should trump the things that players like me enjoy.

You can think that it's stupid that I like that it's not a melee attack unless the character has the melee attack special ability, except in limited circumstances, but that doesn't make you right and me wrong.

I think, another point worth noting is that, just because a character or squad CAN be beaten does not mean the character/squad is not a problem. Lets take Aurra Sing as a example. Can she be beaten? Yes sure! But can she be beaten by any 37 point figure? Hardly. Maybe with JWM, but only with great luck. Of course Cad Bane or Boba, Bounty Hunter shreds here. But they cost much more points than she does. (Anyway this is just a example, so if there IS a figure in her cost range that can beat her, then sorry about the bad example, but i think you got my point) THAT is the problem with some figures. They are much more worth than their points. Sure, GOWK can be beaten by a squad of flamethrowers and Lightning. But not by 55 points of any attacking figures. Competitive players don't see this as a issue because they mostly think in squads and combos, but for the "normal" players figures like this (and there quite some of them) make for a bad game experience.

This thread has made it to 7 pages without dying so far. We're keeping mostly professional but do seem to be struggling a little bit. Remember, we all want what's best for the game, so in the grand scheme of things we're all on the same side.

Just a few thoughts:

As far as Commander Effect ranges go, there's a certain give-and-take to how each commander works. Folks like Panaka can definitely afford to be in the action, people like Tarkin decidedly less so. The game has been built up around what WotC left us, good and bad, and so I'd venture to say there are a lot of pieces out there that can easily jump over your fighters and take down an important commander without so much as a sneeze. But I think removing those deep strike pieces would simply mean you and your opponent pack your fighters into large clumps and have your commanders sitting behind them just within 6 squares, or worse yet, the game becomes dominated by everyone having truckloads of bodyguards to protect their weak commanders. (perhaps more interestingly than that, I think there's a powerful thematic argument for limitless CEs - some could be considered instruction prior to the battle, or instruction received via comlink. Just a thought). Also just curious as to how Mouse Droids would fit into all this? In the scheme of things, Mas isn't much more powerful than Mice - a lot more convenient, but having 5 mice is only 15 points, provides a massive range for all of your commander effects, and gives you plenty of hard-to-hit doormen.

As far as some recent counters (specifically tempo control), while it'll be interesting to see how they work, some of them are as strange as tempo control is annoying. Not "bad" strange, just appears very abstract to me. Many of them hand out defensive abilities to allies/hinder enemies once your entire squad is activated (see Jango Fett Mandalore, Queen Amanoa, and the new Darth Plagueis). Some of these make a great deal of sense. I can easily picture Amanoa using Dark Side powers or something to trip up an enemy. I can easily picture Jango Fett warning his followers to brace for attack. I have a much harder time wrapping my brain around why Fleet Admiral Dodonna would decide to save the heavy blast shields for when you're heavily outnumbered.

As far as Aves goes, although I don't go to tournaments, he doesn't seem to be super popular. Just my play style, I think I would be much better off spending 29 points beefing my own squad up than messing with opposing CEs. BUT, this is the design team taking things slowly: imagine how horrible it would be if Aves turned out to be super-powerful? He would join the likes of Whorm, Gha, and Rieekan as the game-breaking maniacs that nobody's heard of.

The Important Part of the Post:
I had a hard time wrapping my brain around what made some squads competitive and others not. Game after game of being ruthlessly stomped by the original Darth Bane left me with a severe lack of faith in squads with multiple weak combatants as opposed to one or two really strong ones. Then, finally, I one day outactivated Bane and shot him to pieces with some enterprising (CotF) Republic Commandos.

In trying to build competitive squads, I eventually figured out that tacking 3-5 Ugnaughts onto the end of it seemed to be a defining feature of competitive squads. So I mimicked top-tier builds in this way, but I really couldn't grasp the usefulness of bringing Bespin's Geek Squad everywhere... UNTIL I played them.

My old squads with a Jensaarai Defender (backed by Leia Skywalker and General Rieekan - yes, we ignored factions) didn't need tempo control to beat out Mandos and Stormies. And Darth Bane didn't need tempo control to knock over the Jensaarai and sit on him. Tempo control just wasn't something that came up in our games, so it took me quite a while to figure out how to use it well. Since then, I have torn apart some squads quite nicely via to some patient waiting, and other times I have been pigeon-holed and blasted apart quite cleanly because I couldn't advance against an out-activating and out-positioning opponent.

All that to say, there's going to be a learning barrier simply because this a very complex strategy game, and the competitive game requires you to use every advantage you can. There's simply more you need to keep in mind when it's Skybuck vs. Vader of Lothal than there is in a good-old-fashioned fistfight between CotF Bane and GOWK.

In conclusion, there will be a learning barrier between casual and competitive similarly to how there is a learning barrier between checkers and chess. Checkers is vastly simpler. That does not make the checkers player less intelligent or even less strategic, simply that he doesn't has one type of piece to consider while the chess player has 6.

Nicely done, kkj. This really gets at the heart of the issue again.

I played a great (WotC-only) three-way casual game recently where all three squads were basically collections of fighters beating each other up. It was a glorious mess of lightning everywhere, Whorm giving Durge a repeating rifle, and Darth Bane running around stomping folks before his HP ran out. There wasn't much squad cohesion except for one squad using Whorm to give Maul and Durge twin, and another squad using Leia Skywalker to give out rerolls.

When playing casual, I find it almost relaxing to just pack a few meat shields and let one or two big pieces go to town on the opposing squad. I will lose many of those matches, but it's fun anyways. But when playing to win, it's the cohesion that's important. The v-set Lord Kaan can self-destruct and blow a massive hole in your opponent's squad, but it's hard to get him in position, it's really the only interesting thing he does, and he'll probably die before he gets to use it, so he's not really worth 36 points. The v-set Revan can drop Kaan from 18 squares away, turning a piece maybe worth 30 normally into a piece worth more like 40.

So, recap of what has been established for quite a while now: Sometimes, a piece (like Darth Bane, Sith'ari) can be a real problem in casual while rarely stepping onto the tournament tables. The tournament lens and the casual lens provide very different standards for what makes a piece "good" and "well-made." It's easier for casual groups to adjust pieces to meet their needs than for tournaments to adjust pieces to create a balanced competitive game.

BUT, this creates a large learning gap between tournaments and the casual players interested in checking them out.

The key then, is a way to be able to demonstrate/explain in-depth how to understand the more abstract strategies of SWM in a simple way. The best way to learn those is hands-on experience, but that requires an opponent willing to face the grittier, more obnoxious competitive strategies. You could "promote" competitive play in a casual setting by abusing things like tempo control, but it's no fun to face a devastating Tier 1 squad when you were coming to play a relaxing casual game.

Sorry for the monologue, but we seem to have reached an impasse: it think it's much easier for casual games to change pieces to better work with their standards than it would be for tournaments to try and create competitive equilibrium out of a casual framework. On the flipside, that's a large gap for a casual player to cross.

It almost seems the answer would be a sort of semi-competitive Vassal tournament every so often, where the "competitive" squads don't mercilessly demolish the competition, so that "casual" squads can compete at least long enough to effectively illustrate how the competitive game works. A sort of Tier-2 tournament, as it were.

If you come to Chicago, Laura and I will buy you a beer and take you (and your wife) out to dinner.

My understanding of what's being said in this thread is:
i) You and Prestige_worldwide pushing for a game-wide ban on pieces that your playgroup finds problematic like Mace and Bane.
ii) Shmi15 complaining about a whole bunch of stuff, a lot of which was addressed in recent design and balance team decisions.
iii) kkj suggesting that we should go back to all WOTC and errata a bunch of their powerful pieces.

You do realise that it's impossible to meet all these demands at once?

EDIT - replying to a thread that has since been deleted.

Not to get too deep into this, but I wanted to point out some rather hilarious irony here.

The Set 1 designers included casual design. In fact all of the sets I was involved in have. And some rather hilariously ironic examples.

Poggle the Lesser - yep, that piece was designed day 1 as a casual piece to give some usage to the boxes of drones that we all had. No one thought he'd see much play in competitive play. I was the lead PT on that set and I recall my PTers telling me he sucked lol. He was designed as I recall by Dennis, who was specifically making him for fun.

Panaka of Theed. Ironically enough, this was another casual figure. It was from our first attempt at a bonus set, and it had one designer, and not enough PT. The designer was Engineer. It was a theme figure only.

Mace Windu. This was a dual designed figure. Built to be competitive. At a time when the primary complaint from the casual gamers was that melee weren't competitive. So we made one. And here's the irony on this one. The idea of the mega crits is a casual design element, not a competitive one. A competitive figure is one that you can generally count on the math to work most of the time. Windu is too random. Sure, Thereisnotry loves him and does the math well enough to know his odds. But it was never Windu that made it competitive, but GOWK with Windu. But a string of crits actually fits the theme of Vaapaad and Windu's abilities better than most things in the game. So that made it a casual design as well. And in fact primarily, he was designed with casual elements with competitive power.

I could name a hundred other examples of this, but the point is long lost on those who didn't get their way at some random time in the past.

The reality is this was always going to be a problem at some point in time. This year's drop from our rather consistent 25-30 the past 3-4 years stands out as an anomaly. But let's assume this is a pattern going forward (I have no reason to believe it is in regards to the championship), a slow drain of players always, always comes with a dead game. Its actually quite remarkable that we are still going 6 years after the game was dropped. This isn't because you didn't get your way and a bunch of casual players left with you, that's total malarkey. Its the natural progression of a dead game that was "collectable" as a core component.

I'd like to personally congratulate and thank James, Jason and Laura, Lou, Eric, and all the volunteers who make Gencon events still happen each year. They do a tremendous amount of work that goes largely unseen and thankless.

I have only one idea to alter the championship. Move to Friday if you want (0 chance of Saturday) or later on Thur. I don't think the time is a critical factor to people attending. So my suggestion would be this.

Change the point value. One of the most interesting years was the first year of 150. Same when we went to 200. Maybe consider doing next year's championship at 100 points again. Give it some old time feel, and most importantly, cut down on the time needed to play it as rounds could be 45 minutes.

I love the idea of having more Vassal tournaments throughout the year. Not only does it mean that location is less of an issue, but it also is more flexible in terms of time commitments. The one that Trevor ran was the first time I had played SWM in about several months because I work weekends and have no one in town who plays. The structure of the tournament meant I could arrange games with people from the other side of the world at times when I was free.

The tournaments can have any number of restrictions or added rules. We can vote on which pieces or abilities to ban, as some organisers have done with events in the past, i.e. MeleeCon. This would give casual players more experience with competitive play and may lead some of them to want to play in regionals and eventually GenCon.

Oh, I was replying to the thread in general. You post was all goods, my man!



I think the best way for things to work is for Casual players and Competitive players to work together. That's the setup I have in Opunake. I have some players here who, if left to their own devices, would quickly get stuck in using pieces that were costed in a way they didn't understand, or not being able to beat, etc. The more competitive players are then able to step in and say, 'why not use X', or 'have you tried this tactic', and then the casual players enjoy thing so much more. With over 1500 pieces and innumerable interactions, no set of rules will make it easy for all. That's why SWM is a conversation.

I was thinking about the whole 'form your own community' thing that I was harping on about before. There's nothing to stop a certain group creating their own way of seeing the game. In NZ, that group is called Save11. We didn't like Daala so we banned it, while it was still used internationally. We had our own scoring system - the 3-2-1 system - while the international community was using 3-2. This year, we had a semi-major tournament that was 'Melee only!' which contravenes the laws of what constitutes a legal game (by the old SWMGPA standards!). Bottom line is, there is nothing to stop a group making its own variations on the game. That's what we did. We still did all we could to stay in line with the International game, but changed where we needed.

That is hilariously ironic.

Sadly, yes.+1

I bet Jack could even get into that format.