Because the old rule led to a lot of people being bothered because they were getting shot in the back by models in their front arc. This isn't new, btw. It was like this for a pretty significant chunk of N3.
"If you can see me, and you are in my front arc, bam bam" is an abstraction that works fine on the table, whats the problem? The real way to see through walls is to clip into a really small space so that a portion of your base extends through the wall. Thats next level shenanigans
haha yea I am remembering that now. it is just the front arc line makes it look like that is their fire path when really they are using the same LoF line the blue troop is using. I remember being sad before that FAQ popped. I have been quarantined too long.
Fixed. I'm a noob player and still think that this is absurd. Editing rules because players don't grasp simple concepts like this, still feels absurd to me. - It's in my front arc! Shooting him is my right! - Can you see him or is he behind a wall? - Behind a wall, but... - There's no But. You can't draw a LoF through a wall. This way seems simpler and more logic to me. The madness is the other way, imh-noob-o ... Change my mind and enlighten me please, there surely is something I'm missing...
You might think it's absurd that they change the rules but keep in mind that; 1. They changed this because people were exploiting the rule to create what people thought were an unfair situation. As it were, this wasn't changed because people didn't understand the rules. 2. We are currently back to how it was during earlier N3. This rule has changed twice in the past 3 years. LOF is drawn from a point in the silhouette to a point in the target's volume. LOF can only be drawn to stuff in the front arc. That's about as simple as it gets without removing the concept of a front arc completely.
This goes on the list of "counterintuitive stuff that we're going to have to point out carefully to newbs." N4 did not remove or really reduce that list, just changed it.
It's actually very quick explaining that (as I've done this several times, the biggest difficulty tends to be getting past the stage of incredulous "it's really that simple?"), it was much harder explaining to people that moving/jumping carefully at an elevated position allowed you to get unopposed shots until you ran out of orders (and usually resulted in gentleman's agreements to never do that to each other).
It's not intuitive at all to any kind of new gamer that the target needs to be in your front arc but the LOF is drawn from your arse sticking out beyond the corner. I think every other game that has a front arc draws LOF from the front arc itself, not the whole base volume.
Maybe is a way to represent the "troup" looking left and right when hearing some noise, or taking care on both sides his covert?
This is also true. They were mutually exclusive solutions, the one that might be logically difficult but feels fairer is probably the best. It's still complicated to explain, but that's Infinity. This is one of the reasons that I think trying to streamline a highly-simulationist minis game is a bit of a sisyphean task.
The most exploitable situation involved the use of elevation. Active model (A) is on a rooftop. Reactive model (R) is on the ground. Currently neither can see the other. Both are facing directly towards one another. Model A activates and moves just far enough forwards to see a bit of the top of R’s silhouette. Because of how geometry works, LoF will be drawn from the top-front of A’s silhouette to the top-rear of R’s. With the original N3 ruling, R does not get LoF and eats unopposed shots. With the N3 errata / N4 rule, R gains LoF because A is in their front arc, despite the fact that the actual connecting line is drawn from the rear half of their silhouette volume.
Its worth noting this is how it was in early N3. Then people thought it was confusing and it changed. Then people realised it was abusable and it changed back. Its worth pointing out that there are different perspectives; I found (and still find) the fact people expected to draw LoF from the 'front half' of the silhouette confusing as fuck. I always found the LoF bullets to be independent checks to be very intuitive and logically simple.
I like the current version in theory, but in practice there's one big issue that comes out. Before, if you wanted to cover a building, you had to choose one corner, or you would open yourself up to getting clipped on the back of the base from both sides. Now, the best solution is almost always to stare straight into the wall, which is both meh from a fiction perspective and from a gameplay perspective. I understand that it's (strictly-speaking) better than the alternative, but I still wish it was something they could have revisited in N4 with a more satisfying outcome.
The funny thing is that when I started playing (back in N2), I intuitively assumed that that would work. It wasn't until much later that I understood the finer points of how the LoF rules were written and saw that you couldn't do that.
Tangentially, it's really nice to have a rules discussion where we can all acknowledge pros and cons to both approaches, and no one has decided that one side is a hill that they must die upon.
It's relatively easy to be magnanimous when the hill has already been ceded in the subsequent peace treaty.
