The organizers have nothing they can do about who brings what. Also the newest thing has forever been popular. The organizers only count as far as mission selection. Some forces are just better or worse at some missions. That will probably always be the case. The missions this season are mostly in need of fast troops and order efficiency. There's a lot of go there, get that, take it there missions now. Sadly some have just not kept up with it.
I'm curious what "becoming an official Satellite Tournament" means to you in that context? A change in Faction distribution? Yes, because a year will have passed and ther might be at least one new army released until then and it might draw players from a bit further away than usual.
I thought Brokenwolf would answer... no the flatter is too flattering I guess. It doesn't matter to be satellite as it doesn't matter to be Interplanetario. It could be your run of the mill beer and pretzel tournament. What matters is the time coordinate and that's exactly the problem I outlined in my post by "today we show love to this specific faction"... and yet you quote me, not Brokenwolf...
I think it is two related things. First, CB made the change in the last few years to focus on singular faction for model release. They now spend a year to release all the units for the new hotness (note not all the profiles), instead of spreading the releases across all factions. Personally, I miss the old release strategy, but I understand that this focused one is better for new players and collectors to mostly complete a faction immediately. And it seems to be working for them. The second thing is the rules/profiles. While it is similar to the first as they mostly focus on singular factions, CB has spreading the love somewhat. MO is competitive, Ariadna (with the notable exception of USAriadna) is doing well, JSA has multiple builds, and the Vanilla factions (with the exception of Tohaa and O12) are doing well. The factions that are in worse condition, IMO, are NA-2, USARF, Tohaa, and RTF. They are in a dire need of a major update, and hopefully we actually get a "Year of the Tohaa." On the topic of Vanilla Aleph, have you tried the Optimates? Gravitypool has been having good experiences with Kyra in OSS.
Oh yeah the Optimates are great. We've been theory-crafting here with a Asura/Arjuna/Clair Haris, but personally I don't have a game under the belt yet (summer time and all, it's a bit slow where I live). Year of Tohaa would really be good to bring back the faction, but then again it'd probably be 3 months to be honest... I only saw real years for the likes of PanO o CA, not the other factions. The strategy of "One faction at a time" is not a strategy, it's a tactic (worse still: it's a contingency, a countermeasure as it is called in Problem Solving) to actually cope with the lack of hands. Imagine a system (could be anything, a pot of water on the hob, a gas in a cylinder or something more complex like a group of people). Any system has equilibrium conditions, potentially multiple, depending on parameters. Now imagine you are in one of these equilibrium conditions in which everything works just fine, not flashy, kinda boring but everybody is content. Any perturbation to that equilibrium has to be minimal if you want to maintain equilibrium. Changing all factions altogether is that kind of perturbation. The system will adjust by itself and in this case even with a tiny bit of help (like pts adjustments). The modification of a faction at a time results in a way to big perturbation for the whole game, even when you have a well kitted out recipe for the modifications introduced. Now instead of self adjusting, the system is in dire needs of a hand from outside and every modification in the scale of the 1st introduced results in spiralling out from the equilibrium condition. Next thing you know you're making balance dataslates (here Army updates a bit too often) and go from a 5-year version-cycle to a 3-year one (we've already seen a speed up from N4 to N5) because it's the only way to deal with certain nonsense that resulted from the spiralling out aforementioned. And then you wanna "streamline" and we all know how well that went... there's going to be another one I wager... but things just keep on piling up because some players complain they want something back. Some (a lot) of Infinity players are coming from another British big game, including me from back to the beginning of the 90's. We've all seen this stuff and how it goes on the long run (30+ years of observation, internal bickering and one faction that comes up as a retaliation of one creator towards another and then the absurd nerfing that end up nearly killing a faction, definitely the interest in it). It's not a prophecy obviously, it's about managing things a bit easier, planning a bit ahead, think about the new as well as the old players... good marketing to keep something alive
