Like I said, it was a tough call. Allow the known problem with GOWK, or keep potentially problematic maps (Teth) out. It has been said that it would be unlikely to have both in one update. Most of the top players I respect point out it was the maps, no the squads, that were the issue. Mustafar/Geonosis all over again, except it uses a squad type that is for some reason hated on.

Well, the new update sounds like it will fix a lot of things. I know it has gotten me excited about playing competively again.

Your loss. Having played in a game with timed wins before, they are not that bad, especially with how I understand it.

Well, it would not appear to have been true of SWM in the 2007-2008 timeframe which is a game I think you might play. The removal of Mustafar after Gencon 2007 made the game leaps and bounds better, and some maps which never made it to legality in the first place remaining so likely would have been even more dramatic had they been introduced and removed. The GOWK ban didn't work out as well as some hoped for Gencon 2009 but the additions by subtraction were golden for Gencon 2008.

Hey I in no way made this personal, I merely stated that my disagreement (which last time I checked I was allowed to have) with the proposed changes to wins and points from them is a big reason I wouldn't attend GenCon.

I never said I would win, I never said I would do anything but possibly attend.

Bullish responses like this simply aren't warranted and quite frankly I am disappointed you would stoop so low.

I hadn't noticed this before, but, wait, what? I'm not sure what games you're playing, but in my experience, it is the failure to remedy broken options that harm games, not remedying them.

I can think of no better example then to contrast the two most recent game systems (other then SW mini's) I have experience with; Wizards of the Coast's Magic: the Gathering versus Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy table top miniature game.

Most of us are probably familiar with the approach WotC has taken with Magic: they have achieved what is arguably the best balanced, competitive game with a strategy of planned obsolescence, banning and restricting powerful cards.

By contrast, GW has consistently allowed their games to languish without the rules getting much attention (the designers are actively contemptuous of the idea of making the game balanced). Blatantly under costed units and options mean that Warhammer, despite being an internationally played game, has a staggeringly striated metagame; there is a chasm between the top tier armies (their equivalents of factions) and other factions.

Unfortunately, the situation with SW minis is more analogous to the model of Warhammer then M:tG; like Warhammer, SWM was (apparently) not designed at base to be a "competitive" game, versus a "casual" game.

That's the elephant in the room here: the DCI guys are taking a system that's not meant to be competitive and trying to trim it back to have a semblance of being competitive.

It boggles my mind here, where we have people on the one hand acknowledge that GOWK is, by any measure, a broken (that is, he's dramatically under costed for his abilities) piece, and on the other hand these same people advocate that GOWK be returned to tournament play.

In my experience, removing broken "stuff" safeguards the life of games, and certainly the competitiveness. M:tG removes broken stuff by having a rigid system that rotates things out of one standard and then bans it from play in other standards. Warhammer simply leaves the broken stuff in, and the metagame periodically undergoes seismic upheavals and then gets set in stone.

And similarly, he will be missing out on a bunch of great guys who are really fun to hang out with should he stick with using something as trivial as a tiebreaker scoring system (which hasn't even been implimented to this point) as an excuse not to attend.

Engineer's brevity may obscure his point, but it's not too tough to interpret that the only reason a scoring system could impact attendance is if you think you could win under the old system but not the new. If you don't expect to win, what difference does it make? If you're going there to meet folks you've only talked to online, and play against the best collection of players available at one time/place, what difference does it make? If you're out to have fun with a bunch of likeminded gamers, what difference does it make? (I guess one could assume you prefer playing incomplete games to actually finishing them, but I've yet to meet someone with that opinion even among slower players.)

Whether you like it in theory or not, it seems a bit premature to start making untimatums about it.