Quote:
Originally Posted by 2000AD  The following post is inspired heavily by one of the most quoted proponents of competative gaming, Dave Sirlin (Link to his website)
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There'll allways be people whose aim is to win and at the opposite end of the scale are the people who just play for the sake of the hobby. Most of the time they're happy playing no matter what. The people playing for the sake of playing just enjoy the experience, while the players playing to win take joy from either winning, a hard fought equal game or a valuable learning experience showing what they need to improve.
The annoying players are those that lie around the half way mark that want to win, but will call any tactic they don't like 'cheap', 'cheasy', 'beardy' or whatever word they want to use. They'll moan and whine about how they only lost because the opponent was cheap and how they didn't play to the spirit of their army, but what they can't accept is that, more often than not, the player that plays to win is often the better player.
Warhammer is a game. It knows no defination of fair or unfair, cheesy or uncheesy, beyond the one simple black or white boundary:
Obeying the rules or breaking the Rules.
As long as the rules are obeyed then anything goes. The person playing to win will use any means necessary as long as it falls within the rules of the game. The person who cries cheesy builds his own set of rules on top of that and limits what he can do.
Chances are a few months later a tactic that was once called cheesy will be easy to beat, but the player who declared it cheesy will still lose to it because rather than try and think of a way to counter it he just called it 'cheap' and tried to take some percieved morale high ground. Meanwhile the players playing to win have probably found more strategies that take the game to a higher level, beyond the old tactic, and which will no doubt still elicit calls of 'cheesy' from the so called 'non-beardy' players.
One group of players are constantly learning and improving, another is stagnent and makes excuses for why it loses.
Which are really the better players?
If you want to play just to have fun then you're going to have to do one of 2 things:
- Find other people like yourself and play them.
Or
- Accept that if you play someone who plays to win then you'll probably lose. Don't whine about beardyness, just try and have fun, even if you're getting massacred. |
WELL SAID.
I will admit, sometimes power creep seems cheesy (IE ASF on HE, etc)... BUT keep in mind
1.) At any given point someone is always the nice new book, and someone is the oldest crap book. So it's cheese, but it's cheese on one of those diner wheels that rotates around so every patron gets a slice sooner or later.
2.) That's GW's deal. It doesn't make a PLAYER cheesy for playing with something GW made and they're just using fair and square. I might blame GW, I'd never blame the player, anymore then you'd blame a soccer or basketball player who had nicer shoes, or a (American) football player with better pads on his team.
In all honesty though, Warhammer has always been more a game for fun miniature use then a realistic game meant for fair competition. It's more figure skating then soccer. More interprative dance then boxing. If you want to play a truly fair and even game, play chess. Or play any of the miriad number of computer games out there that are strategic in nature (and actively patched for side balance monthly by their companies).
Warhammer and the GW lines are best viewed as fun first, and accurate measures of competative skill second. As such calling anyone playing something fair cheesy is like calling a figure skater cheesy because they did an unconventional but legal trick. It's not the same as a boxer slipping a chunk of iron into his glove.