The beta: or the advice I just can’t follow.

How’s your beta going?

So it will come as now surprise to anyone to discover that I have jumped around all over the shop during the beta so far. I know! Who knew?

Beyond my usual flip flopping tendencies there have been a couple of additional reasons for this, which I’ll come to shortly.

But firstly, some advice! That I have utterly failed to take!

It’s important to recognise that 4th edition has a general (and probably quite significant) downshift in power level.  Everything has been nerfed. Everything. Except of course it hasn’t, that’s just the new normal.  Now personally, I am a big fan of this as a philosophical shift in the game for 4th edition as it means that more often than not I am playing the person opposite me more and less the rules on the cards they have chosen. This, for me, is a more hard skill vs soft skill game style approach that I enjoy. I’m not saying it’s better, or more superior I am simply saying that I enjoy it. Which is nice.

What this does mean is that when directly comparing what your preferred Master in 3rd did to what they do in 4th it’s going to look they caught a massive nerf because of this power shift down. I would hugely encourage folk not to have this mindset! Instead look at everything from a more holistic approach of where everything sits next to one another.

This is the advice I’ve been giving folk, and am also seemingly utterly incapable of following myself.

What this means, despite my best efforts and despite them being my most played Faction of M3E I am really struggling to get on board with M4E Guild. In particular Lucius 2 and Sonnia1 with whom I have spent the bulk of the last edition. For whatever reason I’m just not vibing with it. Now I will admit that with each successive pass of changes both Witch Hunter and Elite look to be significantly improving and are more appealing which is wonderful to see both from a personal perspective and from a functional one: yay playtesting and actioned feedback.

So I’ve not been playing a great deal of Guild. I’ve been painting a lot of Guild! Having just finished painting my Guardsmen.  Gosh that was a slog to chew through.

The other reason I’ve not been playing a lot Guild at the moment, is well…outside of gaming the world is a very serious place at the moment. So whilst staying suitably social media vague (UOkHun?) and whilst I’m not at the stage of posting Linkin Park lyrics on my MySpace page or anything the authoritarian nature of The Guild isn’t particularly aligning with the escapism I’m looking for in my hobby atm. And that’s fine. I’m still sticking with my goal of BIF:Aus but who knows how that will go, but I did take 2nd at a tournament yesterday which will hopefully help!

So what have I been playing? Well I’ve been loving a bit of Youko1 and Damian1.  Both fit my needs of beautiful models with mechanics that fling scheme markers into far flung places. So both Orange and Blue are on the maybe pile as a result of this.

Then of course there is the ex. The Bayou. Just hanging around in the background. Maybe 4th is finally the edition where I make Bayou work for me? It didn’t escape my attention that a lot of the changes to Sooey I called for on this very blog are currently being tested (I’m not for a second suggesting I had anything to influence that but naturally my ego is thinking it) so of course, I done made some pig.

If nothing else they will be great to paint up and are nice big chunky models and that’s always fun.  They also don’t have red coats…

Lastly, to finish this rambling collection of thoughts I had a great conversation with a friend yesterday in which they expressed that they weren’t taking part in the beta as they couldn’t keep up with the changes let alone submit feedback on them so instead is just going to wait until till it’s finished, sure there will be outliers but there always is, was their take away.  

What a brilliant attitude. 

It’s a beta not a preview, work is needed. If you don’t want to do the work you don’t have to, so don’t worry about.

Tl;dr do fun things.