Because it’s better to have conversations about house rules and etiquette when you’ve got people calling each other “cheaters” and “WAAC” because they don’t agree on the meaning of single bullet point in the rules?
Which is tame compared to any intent thread, ever. As I understand it, they would rather let people fight over it on the forums rather than making a captains call on it and risk alienating communities that play the other way by telling them that they are playing it "wrong" which is why we've never had the intent debate clarified ever despite concrete promises to do so.
The one thing I miss about having profiles and points costs listed in the rulebook until a couple of months ago is how indefensible it made the notion that accessing points costs is cheating.
A word of advice to all noobs and vets alike: If during a game you behave like a dick, people tend to treat you as such in return. You gonna gotcha opponents hard, they will auto-adjust to gotcha back. You gonna be like "I don't need to answer that" - is what you gonna get. I've been playing Infinity the Game since pre-N3. Even though people tend to either love me or hate me, I had maybe five games total where my opponents were all tight ass, none responsive, passive aggressive pricks who wouldn't tell me stuff like if their army had access to any AD: Combat Jump. These people are usually tryhards AF and tend to loose badly. All the other games I had, and we're talking hundreds of games by now, were cool, courteous, respectful - even if at some point emotions took over for a moment, which happens in tabletop wargaming. In my opinion Infinity is all about player to player communication during a game and it really works most of the time. Even refusal to provide some information can be phrased in a way that will keep a healthy gaming atmosphere. This shouldn't be regulated, as some here suggest - this is just standard human interaction. Infinity has all the guidelines in place plus in the end it's up to TO to regulate use of Army app or not (just like chess clock) and if someone feels offended by particular meta way of play - just don't go to an event. Vote with your feet. edit: To be clear, what I mean by "being a dick" is a way of communicating not what information you try to keep to yourself or which side on the "information share" debate you on.
Funny thing is, people often assume that advocating the open and voluntary sharing of information that can be deduced/determined is done out of personal competitive interest, but at least in my case the opposite is true. Take this example, I'm opposite a guy who is clearly struggling to remember what he's proxying his stuff as and what the profiles he is proxying for actually have, and he's sinking minutes into examining a particular fire lane, so I ask him "what are you trying to do?". Normally when I ask this question I'll usually get an answer like "can this guy get to here without being shot", which I'll answer with either "no, because" or "no models on the table will gain LOF". Instead he tells me "I don't have to answer that", which is true. So what does he do? He spends 4 orders moving a monk to throw smoke in front of a Gao Rael Sniper in a triad. When he walks into the smoke and I declare my ARO with the Gao Rael, he tells me "You should have told me he has MSV2" (I then give him a 5 order do over out of the goodness of my heart, in a tournament).
Im sort of a newish player, as is my friend with whom I play regularly. Local tournaments nerby give both players an hour each for everything they do, including deplyment. We triend that once for fun, and ofc both of us failed miserably, both being out of time during turn two. So if I were to play in that tournament and my opponent would start recreating my list in Army I wouldn't mind, but the clock is ticking.
Time contraints are a real issue, and hopefully the TO has a clear way on how they deal with these issues. That being said, slow-play and such are a separate issue that is independant from the question at hand. (Someone can burn down clock time with literally any action in the game.) A player can sensibily use army to verify informations without burning a single second off the clock. While their opponent is deploying, they can easily answer all their questions about the opponent's faction without bothering their opponent in what is arguably the challenging and demanding part of the game.
Oh my god. Seriously? I love you all but you're killing me here. It's right there in the rules. Key language underlined and in red to highlight it. First: What exactly is an Army List? Cool. So your Army List is your specific list you built to play during the game, not the whole range of troops available to your faction. Next: What info is/isn't Private? Salient points: Only information on a player's Army List can possibly be Private Information. Only the things on a player's Army List that are explicitly Private can be Private Information. The Cost and SWC of a faction's available troopers is not on an Army List. Private Information only protects you from your opponent asking you about it and permits you to not disclose it during Deployment/until a game event forces you to do so. Nothing in Army is or can be Private Information except specific information on a specific Army List that you've built/loaded in for yourself. Logically, a troop profile you add to a given Army List doesn't stop being part of the overall trooper inventory for the faction, so its presence in your Army List doesn't make it suddenly invisible in the larger set of data. Your opponent cannot ask you about points or SWC of the models/markers/etc. in your list/on the table, whether you have any Troopers off-board/hidden, whether you have any HoloMasked troops, what's under a Marker, which Troopers on the board have CoC or Counterintel, or which Trooper is your LT. That's it. Period. Fin. Full stop. This is not hard. Using Army or not during a game is, like so many things (doors, railings, intent, do-overs, error corrections, windows, what is or isn't a ladder, etc.) a matter of player consensus. Suck it up and add it to the list of things to check about before a game/with a TO. Don't get too attached one way or the other, just try to have fun, this is a recreational activity FFS. Thanks for coming to my TED talk or whatever.
Also, just to take the piss for a sec...RAW you're required to write down all private information before the game starts. Is anyone transcribing all of Army just in case? No? Then "only the stuff on my specific personal Army List" isn't hard to wrap one's head around as a statement of scope.
Deducing private information isn't against the spirit of the rules. If it's against the spirit of the rules to deduce it using Army, it's against the spirit of the rules to deduce it using your memory.
Yep, exactly. If deducing it is with the help of the list of all units and their profiles for the enemy army is against the spirit of the rules or even "cheating", then knowing the same data by heart is equivalent to "card counting" in a poker game.
To put it bluntly: not the reason you think it is private. i.e. not to prevent a player from doing exactly that. The point of the points cost and SWC of "this trooper right here" being private, as has been expressed multiple times already, is to prevent your opponent from being able to tell that the Umbra Spitfire I took is, in fact, the Lt. because it costs 40/1.5 instead of 42/1.5. If that Umbra happens to be the only model on the table that could be Lt. (and I don't start my turn in LoL), then it's my bad for not obfuscating that fact with other options.
This is the first time I've ever heard a satisfying explanation of why this rule exists. Thank you. I still think the rule could be phrased better, since anything a player could reasonably memorize should be open information (in my opinion), but this is at least acceptable.
Yeah, I was going for exactly that upthread with the Tankhunter example, but Triumph did not notice or ignored that argument. Maybe 2nd time's the charm ;)
I ignored it because it's an asinine argument to make, there are so few profiles where this twisted logic actually functions, whereas it functionally makes the private information of cost for every other unit in the game worthless. Trying to argue that the points cost being private should only be relevant for a handful of units is stupid, particularly when there are whole missions that revolve around scoring with that private information. Basically Sabin76, I deemed it an argument dumb enough to be worthy of Nuada's opinion, so naturally I ignored it the first time around. This idea I find particularly stupid, the idea that we are simply giving the same advantage to players who can't remember profiles as the elite players who can remember all the profiles. What elite players are these? Anyone who tells you they can remember all the profiles and all their costs with perfect recall is frankly, probably full of shit and lots of it. There's what 9 factions in the game? Average 50 units with 4 profiles each? You're looking at like 1800 profiles. You'd either need to find someone who studies Infinity like its their literal job 5 days a week or has a photographic memory. Pretending we need to cheat the private information mechanics to combat these players is laughable at best.
Um, so, Chain of Command is Private Information, which is only relevant to the handful of units which have Chain of Command (except the Farzan). So I guess it's stupid that Chain of Command is Private Information? And since all units with CoC have different point costs than their decoy non-CoC equivalent point costs, keeping those point costs Private is just necessary in order for CoC to be Private. But I guess that's stupid too. And I won't go into the pointless rudeness in your post, though I hope @psychoticstorm will.
