I'm leaning into unfavourable, but not too much on a personal basis, more on a missed opportunity level. Aside from the weird choices of Rao, Kusanagi, and Tarik, the only really bad thing is losing Xi Zhu Ang from YuJing which leaves them with one character and a handful of mercs... Voronin and Andromeda both suffer from the same flaw: guard is not a good reason to be s4, essentially giving Voronin MA L1 without Stealth while making him a giant target. Just give him a K9 with G-synch like the Devil Dog, same for Andromeda but a better Aleph optimised Antipode... Which means that it's no change for Aleph and Ariadna, an inconvenience for PanO and Nomads, confusing for Haqqislam, and an embuggerance for YuJing....
Meh, we often play ITS missions (and sometime other system), even ITS tournament (in the sense of tournament made with ITS missions), and we never submitted our lists through their website so it doesn't really affect my meta.
Thumbs down from me. #1: Nobody wins anything of any importance, two-three factions get saved, the rest get a character tempbanned because fluff. That sure will go well with competitive players and those for whom the fluff is secondary to rules. Also, people do not like to lose things, even insignificant. #2: It's based on an online campaign, which historically were cesspools of manipulated results. #3: What will the final results be based on? Number of games played? Average VPs per game? Win/loss record? Who knows! Does my faction have a chance with 1/3 playerbase ripped out in the middle of campaign? What happens to submitted Yu Jing JSA games, do they count as Yu Jing or as JSA after the Uprising? Who knows! #4: Yu Jing loses a game it probably couldn't have won with the reduced playerbase, loses one of its 2-3 remaining characters. Despite having already lost 4 other characters during the same campaign. Because... who knows! It's not like they could be spared by saying that the Backdoor agent used the insurrection as a smoke screen and evacuated to JSA. I'm not asking for tempbanning a JSA character (but if they're gonna get a profile update afterwards, Neko Oyama would be a prime candidate with how Rao-ish his profile is compared to plain Domaru), but tacking a character loss on top of the recent misery feels like kicking a man when he's down. #5: Banning Tarik. As much as I think Fatality2 is stupid and shouldn't exist in the current form, banning a strong unit from a recent starter-expansion set you're promoting to new players is a terrible idea that's gonna bite CB in the ass. #6: My backdoor kinda hurts now. OK, I said what I have against the campaign, now for the positives:
The thing about it, though, is that CB doesn't really care that we're having this thread... I don't know exactly what they have to gain with this kind of thing if it's just pissing people off. Like do they get a really smug sense of self-satisfaction by taking things away from their playerbase?
Agreed that Voronin and Andromeda have rather uncompelling statlines. I feel like they wanted to make some big diorama models and Guard was added as a justification for the large base. It doesn't do anything to improve how the model plays on the table.
I have to vote unfavorable if just for screwing with the Red Vail starter expansion. Temp or not you don't punish new player purchases. Was the goal some form of balance fix? I am not opposed to mixing patches with fluff but then the "reward" is a lie by necessity or harmful to the game if the winner needed a fix. It's not exactly coinfidence boosting for a tournament game but not the end of the world.
I don't like how it was done, presented and executed. I'm tired of having to fish for how to's, frankly, and stopped enjoying this baiting with the Uprising. Also the CA and Tohaa were saved from the beginning but participating. Add to that Leibarg's winning of the Winter Champion, and the impression is that the CA wins all. Kinda motivating for the Dawn campaign. I wonder how will the Ariadnans fare in a guerrilla warfare against the CA? At least they cannot be sepsitorized... unless the CA implants PoW with Cubes, then sepsitorizes... While the exact method was not made public (logically), the results were "normalized". Kinda strange how Ariadna fared so bad, while Aleph did as well as PanO, while Nomads had so much advantage but the CA won. Then NA2... JSA was part of YJ until the end of this even, as stated by Hellois in the challenge thread. The selection of Xi Zhuang as banned was... the only possible one. The best result would have been for YJ to win, since JSA cannot suffer a banned character with its launch and YJ could only lose Xi... Totally agree here. But Red Veil is ancient! The Beyond Icestorm will see extra sales, with Tunguska being announced, and the new players are the JSA!! Seriously, though, while I assume Tarik's ban was done to de-optimize Tarik with the Khawarij fireteam in sight. That being said, I would have changed his profile. BTW, Tarik has suffered the Backlash from his Caskudillas al Ajillo he was selling to the Ariadnans, clearly Voronin was his main customer, and... XD
No, making the exact method public would be precisely how you would inspire confidence in the results. As of right now, Leribag is known for questionable tournament behavior, and I have no reason to assume that CA winning this challenge was legit... doesn't exactly encourage people to participate.
Are there other incidents or just the retreat thing? Because once doesn't really fit "known for" or I'd be known for taking a dump in all 4 toilets in the Beasts of War studio in one day,falling off world War Two AA bunkers, getting set on fire in Dundee, and watching Danger Mouse on Netflix while making this post...
I would contest that most of the Infinity community at large has no idea who that guy is, and doesn't know anything about whatever tournament incident you're referencing.
I wish that these sorts of events would have fluff repercussions and not gameplay ones. It is annoying to lose access to a character you like just because you happen to not be playing for the one faction that won, and in the end it doesn't feel like an actual change to the story that these people were accused. Imagine if each faction had story based goals for all the campaigns, that doen't change the rulebook but shows up in the fluff sections from now on. So Ariadna might have a mission to control some spaceport in the next BoW campaign, and if they succeed they will be officially given control of a space station somewhere in the next book. Maybe the highest ranked player in the faction is invited to work with CB to name the thing. Meanwhile YJ might have a mission in the same zone and if they win it will be the staging point for the IA on Dawn, and the next book will mention a unit award for one of the new profiles being released that mentions the heroic actions of those troopers as the IA arrived and held the beach head against the CA incursion. Then you would have multiple options per faction in different zones, so that more than one faction can win, in fact I would do it so that basic coordination would allow every faction to win one, and well organized factions could win two or three. I would be much more excited to read a little sentence of fluff like that and know that the games I played in the campaign helped make that event in the setting occur, than I would be to look back in a year and say "hey, remember when we couldn't take Tarik into a tournament for a couple months because CA won that one thing?' The first gives you a cool memory and a sense of achievement, the second just gives every faction but the winner's a feeling of annoyance for a few months.
@elvedril That would require the writers to care about what the players do/want, and, as shown in Wotan, it's on rails.
Favorable IF they write a nice story to wrap it up and explain what actually happened. I also believe they could have come with hibdrred profiles for these characters instead of removing them ... Like a "shame" skill making them unable to be lieutenant or -3 to willpower.
I was just talking with some friend about how much more hype it would have been if they had made an O-12 "alien hunter" character that would join the winning faction because they knew that they could be trusted... give them Sensor *and* Biometric Visor L2, some tools for hunting enemy camo/impersonation tokens.
I don't play ITS, so I am only barely aware of this and, quite frankly, do not care. Based on what I do know, it does not seem like the best idea Corvus Belli have ever had, but it has absolutely no impact on me.
My gripe is that whilst Cb do some stuff really well, such as maintaining a game and mission system with a reasonable level of balance without getting stale, the online campaign and the global its system aren't so hot. I get that some people enjoy them but I'm not sure how I feel about them bleeding into the competitive scene. Maybe now is time to look at the model adopted by online games that often have an off season to try whacky stuff.
Well given who won they'd have a bit of a target rich environment... But it would have been acceptable to announce that character and state that if CA won they would instead become an irregular merc only available with Soldiers of fortune or something similar...
