LordGrise
07-27-2013, 12:59 PM
Okies, so there I was, responding to Pssyche (hope that's how the handle is spelled) on the thread started by Eldar_Atog (I don't have that card::grin:: but I wish WOC was still doing Cracked sets) and I caught myself ranting, and hijacking the thread all at the same time. So instead I'm gonna back the rant down a couple notches and start a new thread, because while I know this subject has likely been done before, I can't remember when on this board, so here we go.
There are basically two flavors of player in 40K, AFAICT (As Far As I Can Tell). There are those who play for fun - either at home, a friend's place, or at the store, pretty much for the socializing and the get-together - and there are those who play for the competition, the struggle, and the right to claim victory. The honorable ones want a fair fight, and will go out of their way to ensure they get it - more power to them. The bad ones want to pwn their victims as quickly as possible, and they are the reason I do not play competitively, because in my experience they outnumber the honorable power players.
That was my experience beginning this game. I was in the US Air Force when I bought into 40K, because I had friends on the base were into it. I bought into Tau pretty much blindly because I loved the way they looked, and I loved the fluff. Finally, some Good Guys! The day I bought in, I walked into Frontier Games (sadly defunct now) with my tax return, and I cleaned the store out of Tau. Life was good.
Within six months, orders had carried all but one of those friends off, never to be seen again - and the one guy left fell in with a new crowd. I went and checked them out. Yeah... I was the guy with the pitiful handful of models, unpainted, not very well put together, wall-flowering at the store trying to learn. I quickly learned not to go there anymore - I apparently embarrassed my 'friend', and it ended with me literally being laughed out of the store for having unpainted models. So I tried a couple other places. I was the fresh meat in the prison yard sense - tabled, over and over again. So I 'sold' my collection, built and not, to a guy who never paid me - and when I got what was left of it back, he had ruined it all by 'priming' everything in either black Rustoleum, or white Kilz. or both. For those of you in other countries who might not know, Rustoleum is a brand of aerosol paints formulated for outdoor weathering. Kilz is another brand of aerosol paint, formulated by and for apartment maintenance and light construction - it is primarily used for covering up patches and stains in drywall and sheetrock. Less appropriate paint for priming is hard to imagine, although one of my true friends suggested interior latex wall paint might be worse. Then I completed the ruination by undoing what had been done. Imagine looking at two thousand points plus of scrambled bits in the bottom of a vat of Simple Green - and realizing you have no build instructions. So I just boxed it up and wrote it off.
Eventually (as in years later) I found a couple of players who did not laugh, but who were willing to sit down and help me. The beginning of my reboot in 40K. Thank you very much, Chris and Robert. Miss you guys.
These days, I won't play against the super-competitive tournament types. That whole scene - the smacktalk, the super-fast-play try-to-keep-up anything-I-can-get-away-with-counts playstyle - honestly, it's simply too redolent of the schoolyard bully tactics I had to endure as a child. I'd rather play at my house, or a friend's place, drink beer for an hour pregame while we do show-n-tell with our latest projects (WIP or otherwise) and then do middle-of-the-road general-purpose lists that we throw together on the spot.
So why do people play this game? And if you play competitively, why do some go to the extremes they do?
There are basically two flavors of player in 40K, AFAICT (As Far As I Can Tell). There are those who play for fun - either at home, a friend's place, or at the store, pretty much for the socializing and the get-together - and there are those who play for the competition, the struggle, and the right to claim victory. The honorable ones want a fair fight, and will go out of their way to ensure they get it - more power to them. The bad ones want to pwn their victims as quickly as possible, and they are the reason I do not play competitively, because in my experience they outnumber the honorable power players.
That was my experience beginning this game. I was in the US Air Force when I bought into 40K, because I had friends on the base were into it. I bought into Tau pretty much blindly because I loved the way they looked, and I loved the fluff. Finally, some Good Guys! The day I bought in, I walked into Frontier Games (sadly defunct now) with my tax return, and I cleaned the store out of Tau. Life was good.
Within six months, orders had carried all but one of those friends off, never to be seen again - and the one guy left fell in with a new crowd. I went and checked them out. Yeah... I was the guy with the pitiful handful of models, unpainted, not very well put together, wall-flowering at the store trying to learn. I quickly learned not to go there anymore - I apparently embarrassed my 'friend', and it ended with me literally being laughed out of the store for having unpainted models. So I tried a couple other places. I was the fresh meat in the prison yard sense - tabled, over and over again. So I 'sold' my collection, built and not, to a guy who never paid me - and when I got what was left of it back, he had ruined it all by 'priming' everything in either black Rustoleum, or white Kilz. or both. For those of you in other countries who might not know, Rustoleum is a brand of aerosol paints formulated for outdoor weathering. Kilz is another brand of aerosol paint, formulated by and for apartment maintenance and light construction - it is primarily used for covering up patches and stains in drywall and sheetrock. Less appropriate paint for priming is hard to imagine, although one of my true friends suggested interior latex wall paint might be worse. Then I completed the ruination by undoing what had been done. Imagine looking at two thousand points plus of scrambled bits in the bottom of a vat of Simple Green - and realizing you have no build instructions. So I just boxed it up and wrote it off.
Eventually (as in years later) I found a couple of players who did not laugh, but who were willing to sit down and help me. The beginning of my reboot in 40K. Thank you very much, Chris and Robert. Miss you guys.
These days, I won't play against the super-competitive tournament types. That whole scene - the smacktalk, the super-fast-play try-to-keep-up anything-I-can-get-away-with-counts playstyle - honestly, it's simply too redolent of the schoolyard bully tactics I had to endure as a child. I'd rather play at my house, or a friend's place, drink beer for an hour pregame while we do show-n-tell with our latest projects (WIP or otherwise) and then do middle-of-the-road general-purpose lists that we throw together on the spot.
So why do people play this game? And if you play competitively, why do some go to the extremes they do?