I've always felt that idle should only be allowed if no other skill could be performed (like the first move put them in contact with very difficult terrain and they didn't have LoF to anything, or something like that). But then I've been on the receiving end of quite a few Kuang Shi order batteries holed up in a building...
True, but an issue of balance is totally different than an interaction that will feel totally dumb and unfair even if the game as a whole was balanced.
The problem is that CB seems kind of inured to ideas of imbalance... posthumans are still a problem, for example. Are they getting fixed in N4?
As someone who got Haqq player in their club, drives every conversations praising Jammer and thus gets a series of butthurt EVERY TIME other factions being able to use jammer in their army, this was my response about Tian Guo. "My Turn" lol Aside from that, yes it is pesky, but one should check out WBA's relatively incompetent about throwing AROs at distance. You might say about Hunduns or linked Shang Ji, but the former we all remember how many Nisses dies on newbie level ARO duty, latter weights heavily compared to other options. Tian Guo jammer is the last sport defence for WBA after their ablative CAMO-Monk defense line goes down, so I assume if someone sports it its whether WBA player screwed his defence line, or their opponent reached crucial point of breaching into WBA's weak DZ. Either way, its screwed.
I mean... this is nothing new for Yu Jing players. WBA has improved Yu Jing's reactive long range game quite a bit, I would say. Between Hundun, two Long Ya with 4 shots each, massive amounts of mines and occasional MadTraps, I'm not sure an ablative line of monks are going to be needed. Just don't try to pick them off when they're in their own DZ, as always.
The issue with reset has already been presented, and I fully expect that the requirements to declare reset are going to get a lot more lax in N4. I just wanted to wrap one reply to all of this nonsense in one place. In a competitive game, you are doing a disservice to your opponent if you are not trying to win. I'll say it once again, and bold it, so you have time to chew on it: In a competitive game, you are doing a disservice to your opponent if you are not trying to win. If you don't want to win, play a coop game, or a solitaire, or something based exclusively on luck. But I don't want to play against an opponent who isn't trying to win. This doesn't mean "be a dick." Being a dick generally is bad (and also usually reduces your chances of winning -- being friendly makes others more likely to teach and share with you, and makes judges less likely to write you off when making rulings). And it doesn't mean cheating either, because that's outside of the bounds of the game. If you play against me, I'm going to be perfectly friendly and cooperative. But I'm also not going to pull any punches -- that would be a disservice to myself and to you. Wanting to play a game and win does not make you a bad person. Choosing to not take advantage of a strong mechanic when it exists is useless because competitive games are literally about exploiting mechanics to the maximum benefit of yourself against your opponent. CB choosing to include this in their game, even when concerns had already been raised, means they are aware of the issue and have chosen to include it anyway. Do you want to actually solve this problem? Play the hell out of the broken profiles and submit your lists via OTM. If they're really that broken, you won't have any trouble overperforming, and if CB sees a profile in the data doing far too well, they will be inclined to adjust the rules or profile. We already saw this happen to Symbiomates. Does this mean you can't have a friendly match? Of course not! Have a friendly game, take something unusual, don't think as hard about each order as you normally would. But if you're not trying to win, let's go see a movie or play a coop.
Unless you're playing for a trophy at a tournament or something, this is also a social game which is supposed to be fun for both players. There is a stark difference between "play to win" (i.e. not pulling punches, not playing like it's a demo game, pulling your own weight) and being a WAAC player, Win At Any Cost player, for whom the cost of other player's fun is one he's eager to "pay". This makes you That Guy in any social game of this type. I'm not sure that Infinity has many examples of this sort of non-interactive gameplay, so I'm gonna use a 40k example - there used to be a Daemons of Tzeentch list that had mostly the small pink daemons which were really cheap infantry and also Troops who could hold objectives. After you killed one pink daemon, it became two blue ones and each blue became two yellow ones. As you can imagine, there was simply no way you could kill as many models as they swarmed the table, especially since they could also summon new ones, on top of what you had in your list. Was using this Daemons of Tzeentch list illegal? No. Was it "playing to win"? Sure. Was it fun and enjoyable for the other player to play a game you couldn't win? Absolutely not. Did using it in pickup games make you That Guy? Of course. It's simple. Don't be That Guy. You don't need to abuse every single dirtiest trick your army can do to count as "playing to win". If you feel like you absolutely have to win every single game by any means possible, I have bad news for you, that's a pure WAAC stance you got there.
A hundred times “no”, and I am a competitive player. “Exploiting” mechanics is what you do in a high-profile tournament, when winning is the sole concern and everything goes. In any other setting, you are being a dick when you “exploit” the rules and try to use every crappy single little loophole. Competition too can be as intended or as written, and fair play and sportsmanship are not antithetical to competitiveness. Quite the contrary, in fact.
While I fully support that making use of "loopholes" is the difference between playing competitively to the advantages available and actually exploiting the game, it's sometimes difficult to tell when something is an exploit or not. Sticking a Jammer inside a 5-man Fireteam for Fireteam bonuses is intentional and not an exploit. The issue with Sixth Sense delay has been in the game for a very long time (as any player who regularly fields TAGs or HI can attest) and whether it is an exploit or not is mitigated heavily by the fact that most of the time it is your opponent who puts themselves in that position. Similarly, making use of forced Change Facing interactions is intentional even if some people think it is an unfun experience that they would rather no one did. That said, I do think we can discuss whether the Sixth Sense interaction is detrimental or not to the game without accusing each other of what's cheating by another word.
What did you spect? was obvious that there will be linked jammer after the spec-ops-testing-field we had, even if there was a noticeable change in tournament results after it first appearance. Just take a look which part of the community is allways heard by CB when they rant about something, and who ranted about linked jammer. Those I refer to, didn't so, now we have this
To be clear, I don’t think linked jammers are a loophole that shouldn’t be exploited, they are simply a feature, albeit perhaps a problematic one. I was talking in a more general sense, and certainly not accusing anyone of cheating. Sorry if it came across that way.
I'm so sorry if you felt like I was calling you out. I just want to put into perspective when the discussion is on the topic of "win at all costs" that the line between when something is intentional and when it is an unintended and unwelcome mechanic can be hard to tell, and I truly didn't mean to direct this at you specifically. Infinity is intended to be a very competitive game, so it might be possible that these kinds of catch 22 traps are intentional, we just won't know, so I think, personally, that it might be better to discuss it in terms of how we perceive how strong or fun they are instead.
No, WAAC / exploiting loopholes, etc is not cheating. You're not breaking the rules, you're only exploiting them as they are, to the hilt and also taking advantage of all hyperoptimized choices available to you. You're paying your taxes, only "fully optimized" and most of your funds are in the Cayman Islands or another tax heaven. It's an ethical quandary, not a legal one. It's also a greyscale because if a newbie takes a "netlist" approach and grabs what's considered "OP" in an army, I will consider it a crutch rather than something broken. With him only learning to play the OP stuff won't matter much because he'd have to know how to abuse it on the table first. At the same time, when an experienced player comes to a friendly game and brings all the negative interactions he could find, playing Haqq and taking four Ghazis, using his Infiltrator Fiday to bait Change Facing ARO in my ZOC from behind a corner and then engaging freely, and so on, I'd be miffed. Yet again, as a fairly newbie player myself, I've been apologized to by experienced players, who did the exact above to me during a competetive match at a tourney and ITS league. They explained fully the weird interaction and how it was legal, but they played out and out to win - and I had no problem with that, it was a comp setting. Personally, I'd much prefer if Infinity was redesigned in N4 to avoid those "gotcha, I know a loophole you don't!" moments in the game.
there is a difference between a legal intended interaction (which should have no problem), and a legal but non-intended one (which is legal, but nasty and an abuse that should be took out as soon as possible by CB, something they have only done three or four times since n1). I don't know if linked jammer getting full bonuses was intended or not. I was sure that it was not-intended when they gave it to pano spec ops, now I think it was a testing.
I'm coming to this from a computer game angle rather than the tax avoidance schemes (which are typically persecuted when detected, btw). Equipping a Dragons Tooth as a two-handed rapier through weapon switching in Dark Souls is within the game's mechanics, but it is unintentional and provide an unfair advantage to the player who does it when doing so in PvP. Likewise, in several shooters it is possible to fiddle with FOV so that it's possible to see through walls and older games typically do not have a mechanical protection in place to prevent this. In Europa Universalis it is possible to lend an AI nation money in order to trick them into thinking they have the financial ability to hire Condottieri from you and then you withdraw the monthly financial aide while the AI won't be able to send your Condottieri home and you can use this to bankrupt nations to give you an advantage you shouldn't have. And so on. So, what's intentional and what's possible are two different things. Making use of intentional mechanics, such as forcing unfavourable Change Facing, which is there specifically to make melee less of an utter dud isn't something that I think anyone should need to apologise for, regardless of setting - unless you're doing it to a player who reasonably wouldn't know about it being a risk ahead of time, of course
That's exactly what happened. I got apologized to because "hey, you probably don't know this trick, sorry - I'm going to do this thing here and I know it's a shitty feeling having that move done against you because there's not much you can do in return and you don't get to interact at all, so sorry for that, here's how exactly it works and you'll be aware of this chance for the future". That was, I felt, a very fair play way of doing this. He got his move as per rules, he played competetively, but made sure I didn't feel like I was taken advantage of because of some obscure non-interaction buried in the game's huge pile of rules. Now, if somebody who's not a hardcore player and not up to speed with the Forum / news, gets a WB list in front of him and meets the full linked SSL2 Jammers, possibly full AVA4, in a friendly pick up game, I think he will be right if he'll feel being punked when he very likely can't do squat about it.
They are limited 1 per fireteam Newbies meeting noctifiers, HRL hafzas and MK2s has been a rite of initiation for quite some time - and way more hardcore than an area denial trooper in a team of paper dorks.
