Sunday, September 23, 2018

Setting down the game.


I recently set out to play more war machine, build up to a tournament footing, and attend a couple local events.  I listened to podcasts, read a ton of material, and played a couple starter games to get my toes wet.  My goals were modest and, I thought, obtainable.  Sadly, I’ve concluded that war machine in its current form just isn’t for me.  That is hard to admit—I’ve been playing in one form or another for 15 years now—but I think I’m done.

There are a lot of reasons for this decision.
1.       Let’s start with me.  In the halcyon days of MKI, the game wasn’t exactly blind friendly but it was workable.  Games were small enough and casual enough that my friends could mark my cards—even my tournament opponents were happy to assist.  MKIII is a bigger more technical game than the version I cut my teeth on.  The app is not accessible to those who depend on text to speech.  You can’t buy cards any more—you can print them out yourself but it’s not ideal.  I have to touch models—mine and my opponent’s—to understand the board-state.  With the current focus on precise placement it is borderline cheating if I bump a model—especially if it’s one of my opponent’s.  The game has become so technical that I have to get handy to understand the board state.  That necessity means I am constantly nudging models, terrain, zones, and objectives.  For someone who wants to play in local steamroller events that’s not good.
2.       I’m not happy with my faction.  Khador is in a great place.  I think it is genuinely competitive and has plenty of unexplored depth.  It also doesn’t play like I want it to.  Part of this is the fact that many of the things that used to be uniquely Khador’s have been appropriated by other factions—medium based infantry, the cold North, crazy berserkers…etc.  This isn’t specific to big red but given how much of the faction’s design is based on the things it cannot have, it is frustrating to see other factions doing the things that used to be uniquely part of my shtick—often better than I can.  I freely admit to a bad case of faction envy.  I want the faction to be in a different place especially with the lack of spell channeling and slow low defense jacks.  Someone said recently that the MOW CID was what every CID should be—a measured balanced exploration of the theme.  I agree.  The problem being that some factions get a reasonable approach and some get entirely new toolboxes and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to which is which.  I wanted something out of left field.  Something to take the faction in a hither-to unexplored direction…that…didn’t happen.  It just feels like PP has a different vision of Khador’s faction identity, design space, and viability than I do.  There are a lot of issues from my lowly perspective but the biggest is the fact that Khador’s raw stats (in particular boxes and armor) seem to rank higher in PP’s estimation than in my experience—especially when my jacks’ run range is less than the length of a zone and the base charging threat of other factions’ heavies. 
3.       Themes.  I hate themes.  People say you don’t have to play themes if you don’t want.  In reality steamroller is the only format being played.  The current SR packet requires solos, units, and jacks/beasts to score scenario elements.  In most cases you’re going to have to sacrifice models to contest.  You know what makes that easier? Free units!  Free solos!  The points really aren’t important.  The extra scoring and contesting models are huge though—especially in a faction that values quality over quantity.  Themes force me into an arbitrary game of rock paper scissors.  If I don’t buy in, I’m giving up free scoring elements.  If I do buy in, I’m seriously limiting myself as to model selection—often to minimal benefit just so I can keep scoring parity.
4.       Competitive play.  This is ironic since one of my goals was/is to play competitively.  The more I’ve read, played, and tried to prep for local steamrollers though the more dissatisfied I’ve become.  It started with a podcast discussing a certain elite tournament in which a player made a mistake, a judge was called, and both players got a warning—one for making the mistake and the other for not catching it when it happened.  We’ve become a community so obsessed with perfect play that it is driving the game to absurdly frustrating extremes.  I’ve spent the following months watching technical tournament play dominate the hobby and drive public play in uncomfortable directions.  This covers a gambit of problems but some of the big items are the move to 2D terrain which makes me feel like I’m playing a board game, the decline in the hobby side (painting, conversions…etc.), the focus on the game as less narrative and more about flags and zones, and a rise in an unhealthy MTG-like focus on “getting good.” 
5.       CID.  I love the idea of CID.  I hate the reality.  I love the fact that defined faction elements get a universal overhaul.  I hate the down time between cycles—something on the order of 14 months or more if they keep adding mini factions.  I hate the way the cycle tunes one theme up to 11 while leaving others to suffer in obscurity.  There are just too many parts of too many factions that need fixing—and waiting 14 months or more to have only one of several pain points addressed grinds my gears.  There are single units like assault commandos and sword knights that deserve their own themes.  We’ve waited years already and we’ll be waiting more years at this rate.  Commandos don’t even count for points in their current theme even if they were playable.  It’s…maddening.
6.       The loss of heart.  In the dark days of MKI, PP had a certain style.  It wasn’t just page 5, though that was a part.  They built their legend on all-metal—all-the time.  It was literally full-metal-fantasy.  When hordes was previewed, Matt Wilson got down in the weeds and did the online release in the forums himself.  The early books were magnificent combinations of fiction, art, and marketing.  I still love some of those old stories to this day.  The RPG, the miniatures, the fiction, all melded as a unified artistic gaming endeavor.  Each book was an exploration into a new aspect of a fascinating universe.  Most of that magic is gone for me.  There are no more books really.  Models are produced with no eye to a bigger story.  It isn’t all-metal any more and page 5 is gone.  I don’t feel like the game is tied to a unified story being told at many levels…it’s just a company running a tournament miniatures game—one I enjoy but lacking the magic of old.
7.       Production quality.  I used to cut PP as a young miniatures company, some slack.  I cannot do it anymore.  I’ve had to send in for recast parts or mispacked components in a third of my recent purchases.  I’m talking stuff like 2 left halves of a horse or a gun arm that is a plastic blob at one end.  I’ve been doing mini crate and they sent me 2 of the promotional models for signing up for 6 months and completely forgot the actual monthly model.  Sure, they will fix these issues at no cost to me without complaint.  It just feels like they don’t care anymore.  Mini gaming is a labor of money and time.  I feel like they’ve lost focus on the simplest part of being a miniatures company—to produce useable miniatures.

I’m going to sell off my Khador in the next month or 2.  I’ll keep my pigs for the novelty and since I have almost all of the faction.  Who knows, maybe I’ll want to give it another try in a couple years but for now, I’m just done.

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