billiv15 wrote:
I guess if I try to sum up my feelings on why it came out like this, I will just say what my practices told me. I can beat the Snowspeeder with a great number of things, if I win map. It's still tough, but there are some nice pieces that can deal with it well (Deri's squad was just once example, but plenty of other speeder squads went down to stuff you might never think about as well). On it's own map (I believe Teth, Taris and Chancellor's Starship were the main three being used, the latter when the guy had double door control), most other good squads were at a serious disadvantage. So, I might have a great San Hill squad in mind, that is probably 70-30 on Bespin, but it's 10-90 on Teth. Or I might have a great Imperial squad in mind, where it's perhaps 60-40 on it's own map, but 30-70 on Teth. Fact of the matter is, when you are dealing with those odds, you finally come to the conclusion that you just have to play the Speeder, or a direct counter, because of the current map list.
I agree 100% about this. I had several people come up to me over the day on Saturday, saw the Speeder sitting in front of me and went "Oh wow, Lobo isn't playing San!" I SO wanted to play San. But I KNEW that if I lost map, I would lose games. Any San squads that I came up with just could not compete at all on Taris or Teth, and not really on Muun Commerce or Starship either. At least last year, Starship was the only one I really had to worry about! So I played San in the 150 on Thursday, and went 2-2, even on my own map sometimes. Now, granted, at least one of those losses was because I couldn't win a single stinking initiative (darn Mara Jedi), but it just more cemented in my mind that I wouldn't be able to win with San, let alone make the Top 8. And I didn't even have to play a Speeder squad on Thursday at all!
billiv15 wrote:
Take away some of the maps, and the odds of speeder dominance is not as connected to map rolls as it currently was, instead it's back to the skill of the players involved. And even then, it wasn't nearly as it's being made out to be anyways. A good number of the top players were running Speeder variants, so it makes sense that the speeder would factor highly. That much is obvious, and it is similar to what was said about GOWK. If you ask Dean, I tried for weeks to talk myself into playing something else, and only decided to run the Speeder on Friday night for certain. The risk of having to deal with playing against it (or a number of other squads that also were abusing Teth in other ways mind you) all day with a melee squad was just too daunting of a task, if you were in it to win it.
I suspect most of the other top players felt similar.
Again, I feel 100% the same way. Take Teth, Taris, and Muun Commerce out of the equation, and I almost certainly would have played San this year instead of the Speeder. I actually almost ran a NR squad with Mara, Dash RS, and a Vong Ossus Guardian, since Mara's Stealth could help her survive against the Speeder. But it was still dependent on winning map to some degree. I could do OK on Taris, but Teth was brutal for that match up.
And frankly, to call the decision to ban GOWK hypocritical, or to infer that anyone who called for GOWK's ban is a hypocrit, is just ludicrous, IMO. None of us even new Teth Monastery was coming (except a few select people), and we didn't know what sort of impact it would have on things. If I had known how brutal the Speeder squads would be on Teth, then sure, I might've been a little more leary about the GOWK ban. However, from a straight up mechanics point of view, GOWK was still too powerful. Even on Teth/Taris, the only way for those Cannon squads to win would be to hope on getting a lucky shot on Rex/Dash, or pray to God that GOWK failed some saves. The games would still go to time, with each team picking up 4-5 rounds of gambit, and then seeing who could survive the last round or two, and end up closest to the middle of the map.
But no, I don't think removing GOWK caused the Speeder problems, at least not on it's own. Yeah, I knew the Speeder would make a comeback. But the Speeder wasn't the problem. The combo of Rieekan + new wide-open maps is what made it the gatekeeper this year.
You know what though, I think the fact that a non-Speeder squad won the whole thing (congrats Deri!) goes a long way to show that the Speeder was NOT necessarily as dominant as GOWK was.
Hindsight is always 20/20. No matter what the decision is, we will never please every single person. I think Dean did the best he could with what was put before him. I think this whole last year has really taught a lot of people a lot of things about the SWM game. Chris West seems to be WAY more knowledgeable now about designing new maps. The WOTC design team realized the mistake that was made with GOWK. Hopefully those groups can take those things, and learn from them, and then press forward.