Morats have Morat. Literally all it does: I design communication and training materials for a living. I can assure you that there is no justification I could give for doing this to someone trying to learn the game, any more than I could for giving Military Orders troops a “Military Orders” rule that just gave them Religious Troop while omitting Religious Troop from their profiles. Because of the complexity of the game, playing Infinity has what my profession calls “high baseline cognitive load.” Meaning that in order to play at all, your brain is frantically juggling things in working memory, which has a bunch of knock-on effects like increased glucose consumption, degraded memory and math skills, etc. When someone new says “learning Infinity is too hard” and gives up, it’s likely because of this. The problem with Infinity’s rules isn’t that they’re bad or even that complex (mostly), it’s that the information architecture for navigating them is godawful. Good design reduces cognitive load and makes things more intuitive, and one of the key tools for that is reducing the number of times you have to stop and search your memory while holding a current situation in mind. Breaking nested skills apart is absolutely good design in that sense. I brought up the Morat rule because it’s a simple, clear example of this principle, but the principle applies almost universally because it’s a physical function of how our brains work. Totally agree that the stickier problems are complex rules interactions, but if the delivery of the rest of the rules system were sufficiently improved, those complex interactions would be easier to see and address in the first place, especially for newer players.
Corollary! If you’ve ever wondered why playing in a tournament is exhausting (beyond standing all day), you might be interested in this factoid: Your brain consumes a huge amount of your body’s glucose supply, and consumes more when working hard. It also burns through its limited supplies of key neurotransmitters like dopamine, which it can only replenish slowly. You can replenish the glucose through eating sweets, and you can temporarily goose your release of some key neurotransmitters via stimulants (which is why people working mentally challenging jobs, or those that require prolonged concentration, tend to be caffeine addicts with a sweet tooth while at work). Unfortunately, sweet snacks and caffeinated drinks don’t exactly make more neurotransmitters, it’s more like they just boost your pass-through rate briefly, leaving you with less in reserve. You’d be better off snacking on apple slices every half hour and drinking water, and making sure you got a good night’s rest beforehand.
@wes-o-matic I am fully aware of all the things you mentioned since I studied about those things. And I agree that some things like Morats for grouping two rules are unnecessary. Or Martial Arts... I have to look it up every time. But some things like TO are 1) grouping a way more huge amount of rules and 2) sound/look better. I had more issues in recent times concerning the cognitive exhaustion you mentioned because of the rapid change of sectorials as well as the addition of new units in 2018/2019.
There's still going to be rules grouping. Camouflage was shown as being kept on TO Camo units, and while all the rules for how a camouflage marker acts and what you can do to respond to it is kept out of the profile, the numerics shared with Mimetism and the distinct Hidden Deployment is broken out. Edit: what I'm saying is; it seems they're only breaking out discrete rules that exist in other places
Hello, it looks a good question to me. I wonder about it really often. I have in the latest years the sensation that Infinity don't get new players. In the city where I live now they are a fistfull of new players, but most of them are comming from another cities in the country and they already played Infinity, so, yes, they are new players in the community but not new infinity players. And I think we lost many players as we wons. Sometimes it looks like a couple of new players are comming but they don't last more than a couple of months. I believe this sensation is because we have the "competitive view of the wargames communities" as reference. Yes, is in this inner circles where most of players know each other, but they aren't the "only players" or the only kind of community. They are a lot, for sure, of casual gamers and small groups of friends which nobody knows nothing about. But the Companies, indeed, know about them because "money talks". Best regards!
The problem here I think is the excesive overlaping of some rules, doing pretty much the same but not exactly and with almost the same "case use".
In my place, in Spain, the comunity seems stagnated at the moment. Is hard to get new players, and some veteran players are waiting to see the new edition, and if they don't like it, seems that they will go to other games.
Playing in the south of Sweden I voted yes. We haven't seen any major growth, more like a stable community with around ten veterans in and around the major cities by the coast (Malmö, Lund and Helsingborg) and maybe another ten beginners or players that have shown interest. There's a fair number of players across the strait in Copenhagen as well but there isn't much mixing except in major tournaments. I agree that Infinity's complexity makes it a very different game and that many new players show interest only to disappear later, not being able to or wanting to invest the time needed to actually play the game. It's not a game you can dabble in, it's an all or nothing affair. We've seen an uptick these latest months in anticipation of C1 and N4. Generally our tournaments see about ten participants and we're aiming for 20 players in october during Malmö Wargaming Weekend (MWW) which would be the largest tournament in Malmö by a large margin (personally I doubt we'll have that many players but hopefully quite a few more than normally). In short, Infinity is alive and well and people are generally very positive about all the news and everything that's happening. There's some divide between veterans who are looking forward to C1 as a more casual mode of playing and veterans who only sees it as a way to rope in beginners but I doubt it will fracture the community (any more than it already is - mostly people are sticking to their normal gaming buddies in the home town only seeing eachother a few times a year in tournaments).
Whereabouts in NorCal? If you're in the bay, we have a fair number or local players. Our last 3 events on the peninsula had waiting lists, and we there are several other local groups of reasonable size in the city, east bay, north Bay, and santa Cruz. Hit us up and we'll see if can find you a game
Out in the Sacramento area. We have a consistent group of a few players, but many are moving off towards faster to play games like Warcry. Adding new players hasn't really been making up the losses.
In hindsight I should have asked whether infinity was growing, staying the same, or declining to get some more accurate data. Still the votes seem to align with many of your comments about steady but slow growth. So that is good news. Thanks for your input!
I came back to Infinity after a break of about 4 years recently, as my local club in Norwich UK is really dedicated to the game. We have about 20 players in the city now, maybe more, the store in question (the Games Table) has 5 maybe 6 tables built now, a lot of us played a lot of games in the Asteroid Blues campaign, and we're about to start to see regular tournaments. Saturdays and Sundays there's often a pickup game going on, you can find an opponent very easily. I'd put this lovely success story down to a few things: lurking vets being drawn back, a good general scene in the city, but most of all the support of the Games Table. The owner (Dashat player) really loves and believes in the game and has gone out of his way to make a success of it. I think that is what makes all the difference, frankly. The game is technical and by its nature supervenes on a high level of support.
In my regular store in Southern Poland Infinity figures dissapeared long ago. When i started playing 4 years ago we had tourneys hosted and people were playing it everyday. Over last two years i cant say i can find people playing it apart from me and my friend here That being said, there is at least one store in neighbouring city that is still selling figures, and i would assume people still play regulary around the metropoly, but i have stopped following it year ago so dont rely on my words. I can just remember people giving up on the game thanks to the amount of squables about rule interceptions.
Sadly, my close-by hobby shops barely sell any Infinity materials, so there's no community for it. I'm the only person I know that actually plays the RPG and never saw anything about the wargame.
Our community hasnt had a store that carries product in 4 years at least but we've managed to grow. Its not as easy if people see the product in store but it can be done. We make sure to play mostly in public so we can draw interest.
Last Friday I saw two newbies playing and I played someone I had never seen in the store before (though he seemed to have a decent idea of what was going on).
In the Toronto/Durham Region area in Ontario, Canada there seem to be a number of players and groups that get together regularly. Not in the same numbers as 40k of course but there are surprisingly more people playing Infinity where I live than I expected. My small local shop carries a decent selection of newer Infinity products while Meeplemart in Toronto pretty much carries *everything* for Infinity, so I suspect they are seeing enough business.
