Sure you can teach that, but that is not the problem. The problem are those who lack that sportsmanship even if they play for 10, 15 or more years. Or start to play in an environmant which thrives WAAC players. We had a nerdstore here, selling GW, RPG etc. stuff, but the problem was the owner couldnt loose. He was willingly beating the crap out of people starting games with their first miniatures and as expected lost nearly all of its customers.
Yes, I've seen this myself too regrettably. In fact, it was how I came to Infinity - because although I'd had a good experience at one store, I moved to a new area and the Games Workshop community was struggling with a notoriously 'WAAC' manager. On the other hand, I think @locksmith does have a point about trying to get wayward gamers onside, and my experience is that they can be some of the best people, but you may have to be very cunning to defuse the way they fight against that themselves. Spoiler: Another too-long but hopefully heart-warming tale I think there's some wisdom in the attitude (apparently attributed to US President Lyndon Johnson regarding J. Edgar Hoover) - "It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in". If people are going to behave the way they do whether you like it or not, the best you can do is find a way to get them ... inside the tent, as it were. In that story of the Vanguard club, we had an incredibly troublesome character who fought me over any arbitrary thing every single week. He was incredibly disruptive, confrontational and totally unreliable in the things that he himself argued for. Like we'd change the format of the next tournament, then he wouldn't show up for the thing we'd changed for his benefit. Or one time, we'd arranged a match in a town a good two hours drive away, and had to meet at 6.30am to get there good time. 6.45am and still no show; no-one can raise him; we dispatch the shop manager in their car to his house - no signs of life; already late, we decide to go on without him. Halfway through the journey, someone gets a message through to him and we find he's gone away on holiday and didn't think to tell anyone. Cue me (just about the worst player in the club) standing in for him, the No.2. And it was like that every week until I started playing smarter to get him onside. I found out he was doing teacher training at Uni and thought maybe he'd rise to the challenge of some kind of lecture on game strategy, but after the match where he ended up shouting"You're not my real Dad; you can't tell me what to do!" etc. I kinda thought someone else should suggest it to him. I started hiding myself away, and pulling the strings from behind the scenes and he started getting more involved. He was never a joy to have around frankly, and hardly what you'd call a team player, but eventually, that was the guy I mentioned went on to be the National champion and when he won, he talked up the club and the shop - so he obviously wanted to be a team guy, but was just finding it difficult. Good story, huh? TL;DR we scheme and plot to get the most difficult guy in the club playing on the team; he goes on to win the Nationals and give the credit to the club and the store. Things ain't always quite what they seem.
Someone who obsesses over winning should move to different games. Miniature wargames are not the ideal battleground for such players. There are too many people who do not share that obsession, there is hardly any money to be won, and the percentage of luck being a deciding factor of the game is too high. Experts believe that chess has 7% luck, poker has 35%. The rest is the skills of the players. The luck factor of Infinity is probably higher than poker. I don't want to even think about 40k. People who are obsessed with wanting to demonstrate their skill to the world should play something that requires more skill and less luck.
For the store, but it still damaged the community till today in my eyes. You miss that most people play more than one game, at least in my area. They play Infinity, X-Wing, Force of Will, Magic the Gathering, some Games Workshop games etc. And they take the attitude from one game to the next.
I couldn’t agree more, Prophet. I think it's great for us to take our game seriously - to study it, work on our lists, discuss, develop and practice strategies and tactics. It's a game that's certainly rich enough to reward that kind of effort and we can reasonably expect better players to beat poorer players more often than not. On the other hand, the game is rather beguiling in that whilst it obviously requires tremendous skill to be a good player, the variability of the dice rolls means that if one player isn't significantly better than the other, an evenly-matched game could well be decided by dice rolls... This really isn't a sound basis for becoming overly-invested in the outcome of individual matches, and so I think it's understandable that many experienced and regularly competitive players are outspoken about the rules that have such a big impact on variability - Criticals, Shock ammo and the way The Interpretation That Cannot Be Named™ affects ARO.s They're that much more invested in the outcome of their games, and understandably want to play the game in a way that better reflects the investment of time and effort they've made in the game. It's reasonable to feel frustrated by those rules if you've studied and practiced, and travelled hours to a tournament only to be defeated by a weaker player who got lucky with important dice rolls. The point is that we know the game rules as written and intended do currently involve a lot of luck, and that should have sobering implications for how much merit we ascribe to the results of our games. TL;DR Infinity is a real test of gaming skill, but because of the central mechanism of dice rolls, Infinity isn't the same sort of test as Chess or Go. The relationship between match outcomes and effort isn't as direct as we might reasonably think, and we might want to be wary about how we regard our successes and failures. Maybe some better players would care to comment on how this affects sportsmanship etc? [edited]
How on earth can chess be 7% luck? Is that just the chance that you run into a line that you don't know? Also not to be nit-picky but I think 40k has much less luck than Infinity does. Larger pools of dice tends to mean everything regresses to the average.
Certain portions of 40k use pools, but entire scenarios can be won or lost based off the deployment roll. Also factional and build match ups are significantly important. Infinity has a recovery factor that actually allows you to deal with failed plans. If your units get spiked away too early or meet their kryptonite, you are sorely out of position and have to push resources that then turns an entire game on its head in one sequence. That, too me, is why even with the low dice counts and rolls, Infinity still ends up as superior as player agency to problem solve through the unlikely result versus just being crippled with little recourse to recover.
I would say it's more that the skills of "doing things with a back-up plan" or "dealing with unexpected change" make a larger difference in Infinity than they do in other games. Other games probably depend more on list construction and deployment, but to be fair it's not like those things don't matter in Infinity either. I don't really get what the recovery factor you are talking about is, could you elaborate?
The Order pool allows significant redeployment whereas single units/models in most games get one movement phase and are stuck in their location. Infinity, you can put a model where it needs to be by expending resources to maneuver into place, gunfight, etc.
I don't buy this at all. A simple method to determine how much luck factors into a game is to observe if the same people are winning time after time in big tournaments. When X-Wing World Champion Paul Heaver won the first time it was cool and all but when he would continue winning championship after championship then you knew the game was properly competitive and luck is not the deciding factor at high levels of play. Same is true with a more luck based game like Magic or Netrunner. Do the same names keep showing up at the top tables in infinity or is it more of a crapshoot? I think it might still be to early to tell but I have hope.
Ah, thanks that makes more sense now. The only thing that I think makes Infinity tournaments more of a crapshoot sometimes is the whole minor/major victory thing, but otherwise I completely agree with this.
I agree about the minor/major victory thing. A hard-fought tooth and nail match between top players being a close game can cost both players a spot at the end table. Sadly however I fear it is an unescapable evil as realistic time constraints force the need for degrees of victory as a tie breaker.
I must say that after playing the game regularly for 18 months now, I still find the usual 3 Turn limit, and the ITS 2 hours limit awkward. This isn't to say all my games run over 2 hours and want to run for more turns. I've played very many that were over by the 2nd turn or that were finished well within the time allowed for ITS. It just feels awkward in a way that chess timing - in whatever form, never does. I'd have thought 2 ½ hours and more variability in the turn length would both improve the competitive experience - if you finish early you can get refreshments and deconstruct your match together, after all. The limits seem surprisingly un-Spanish.
I agree with this sentiment. Overall 40k seems to be able to keep things in a neat average, at the cost of what to me is rolling dice way too much way too often. Seriously, if anyone says the words 'I get a re-roll' I feel a migraine coming already. Incidentally, I left 40k last year. I used to have the same problem with time limits, but we had to implement them because people kept stalling the games over and over. My solution was to not think about the time, but keep myself thinking and acting anyways. Most of my games usually end with a 15 minute window before the alloted 2 hours now.
I think it's worth noting that distribution in 40k varies depending on what your army/list relies on. A ton of dice and sensible averages were always a thing (as far as I can remember), but sometimes your ability to begin rolling those volumes depends on wider RNG. Think old reserves, charge distances or maybe some Chaos artifacts (to this day variations of "Book didn't work, I know how it will end already, let's call it a day and have a beer" is some sort of local meme here).
I think a lot of people here are confusing WAAC with poor sportsmanship. While they are often times closely linked, they can also be exclusive to one another. This is perfectly exemplified in my local 40k scene, although I stopped playing about a year ago, I'm still friends with the guys. One guy, Gavin, is a tough player. he plays hard lists but always brings a smile to the table. He's a great sport, but expects a very competitive match. Another, who shall remain nameless, is a dick. He considers himself a casual player who plays "for fun". he constantly complains about tournament lists and will badger and make fun of people online because of how they choose to play the game. he feels as though he is being cheated out of a game, i suppose. while neither of these players would consider cheating or bending he rules, perhaps they are not WAAC but have differing mind sets. We have to keep in mind these games are first and foremost a social interaction, any game is. Attitude goes a long way. Another interesting topic that I haven't seen covered here is giving up. Is it ever appropriate to just call the game? Perhaps you feel the game in unwindable for you, is it worth playing it out and having a shitty time? do you owe your opponent to play it out? would you expect the same from them?
This is a great post, thanks Mike' There's so much to unpack in this sentence and the more difficult thing is about how things change so much between locales, and what's WAAC in one place is just playing hard in another. The important point for me here is your describing a guy who's not necessarily easy company or not everyone's ideal match-up, but the place is better for having him there. We could all wish to rise above our shit-posting on the forum and achieve THAT instead. I love competing; I've done it all my life in every game or sport I ever played, and can take a little pride in having sometimes managed to do pretty well as an amateur. Which experience unfortunately informs me that no-one's ever going to remember me as the guy who dominated the competitive Infinity scene! Thing is I'll go away happy with my 7th out of 8 place and another ITS consolation prize bag patch if people think I'd added something to the event just by being there.
One guy who used to run tournaments in Bremerton, Charles, was always fun to play. He'd crack jokes, etc, and generally made sure you were having a good time. Usually while he stomped you into the dirt, because Charles was a really good player. But I never had a bad game playing him, even if I was wiped to the man. If I'm enjoying the game, I will not call it. I may actually be trying to push the game to see how much I can interfere with your win. Back in N1/N2, I'd call games in the middle of Turn 2, usually because someone had killed my LT in turn 1 and just killed my replacement LT in turn 2. Two turns back to back in Loss of Lt is game over, man. In GW games, if you quit your opponent gets all the VPs. So there's no incentive to call the game to tank the opponent's VPs. In Privateer Press games, calling the game just gets your opponent minimum VPs for the win, no additional VPs. So if your opponent is just a dick (and you don't have a chance of reaching the top table at the tournament), there's little reason NOT to call the game just to screw over your opponent. I've heard people say, "well, you're a dick to play, so I concede. Have your 5VPs." Yes, that was Charles in a nutshell. Horde-o-Gaunts in 40k4e, my running shout facing him was "Bugs, Mister Rico, Zillions of them!" Nobody ever disagreed with that.
