Fool wrote:
Have there been pieces before that have totally changed the Meta that were priced wrong? Definitely. (JWM comes to mind)
There are several things that are wrong with this comparison though. The JWM was admitted as being a slight mistake. But it was probably the difference between 26 points, and about 30 or so. Plus, the mistake was not admitted until some time later.
To top it all off, the JWM came out in June of 2006. No errata has ever been released for him. Has the JWM ever been a KEY piece of a squad enough to make it dominate a competition? No. It wasn't even very popular at GenCon 2006 from what I understand. We saw a lot of JWMs at GenCon in 2007, but out of the Top 8, there were two Han Scoundrel squads, a Luke's Landspeeder, my San Hill squad, and then 4 squads with JWMs. But those 4 JWM squads were not CENTERED around the JWM. Each of them had vastly different approaches. It could be argued that in Dr Divot's squad, Boba BH was the key and central piece. And I would argue that R2-Astromech was a more lynch-pin piece to that squad than GOWK.
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#1. Play him. Duh.
#2. Build a squad to try and beat him (either by killing his support or out-pointing him).
But see, this is the thing that irritates a lot of us SO much. GOWK causes about 700 pieces in the game to be unusable in the competitive scene. It's basically as bad as banning all those other pieces! Now sure, a lot of those may not be 'tournament worthy' pieces anyways, but you can be sure that without GOWK running around, that number is WAY smaller.
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I think the minute you start banning pieces, you start to change the philosphy about the game and what it means. Soon, all of a sudden a 7 point piece that can deal 50 damage is banned. Oh, look. A piece that can attack from 40 squares away - banned. Oh, Critical hits on 15's - banned! (You get the idea - not the best examples but even still).
Well, you gotta figure, Rob has designed 800+ pieces now, and he made a mistake with 1 of them. If we ever have any other pieces that disrupt the flow of the game this badly, I would guess we'll have another 800 good pieces to play with in the mean time.
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Over the past 3 years we have seen a wealth of unexplainable point valued pieces. (Luke JM being 74 while Vader, JH is 75; Mace Windu, JM being 2 points MORE than Mace Windu; JWM at 26; etc.. etc.. etc...). Did we lobby to give Luke MOTF2? Grievous, JH didn't get Jedi Hunter I don't recall.
People have lobbied to give MOTF 2 to Luke JM or give Jedi Hunter to Grievous JH for as long as I've been in the game! But has it accomplished anything? No. Rob has said, time and again, he will not use Errata to balance things. And the small cost difference between pieces like Mace Windu or Mace Windu JM are so small it's actually sort of tough to determine what would be a more appropriate thing to do. But we've seen test reports of games where someone treated GOWK as if he cost 55 points...more than DOUBLE!... and the GOWK squad
STILL won the game! We're not talking the small differences we've seen with some pieces in history. It's completely off the charts in comparison.
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You find a way to win against him (or win with him) and if that means everyone at Gencon has GoWK, then so be it.
I think this is the biggest reason right here. It has nothing to do with winning against him or finding hate squads or any of that. GOWK is just plain boring. It takes no ingenuity to play the piece. You can make bizarrely ridiculous play errors and still win the game based on a couple of dice rolls. It's not that I'm worried about Joe Average beating me. I'm confident that if I'm playing GOWK, I can still win those games 99/100 times. I just don't want to spend 5 hours on Saturday at GenCon, playing 4 rounds in a row against a mirror squad. There's no enjoyment in that. And honestly, there's not much strategy either. It all comes down to who has the hottest dice.
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If by next Gencon, they haven't then at least we've done all we can as a community and then, if nothing is changed and everything is as it now stands, then, by all means, ban him if you really feel there is no other viable option (and I will point out I still don't agree)
And on most levels, I'd love to take this route. Let it stand for now, wait till after GenCon. Let that prove to the Design team that there is a problem.
However, there's something that makes me feel the other way, and it's an even stronger influence. There's a high school kid at the LGS, who's a good player now, and regularly comes in right behind the other top player in Cinci, and has actually taken 1st in tournaments now and then. He's becoming a better and better player. After only a couple weeks of playing GOWK under the new Errata, his comment was basically "What's the sense in playing, if I know I'm always going to lose to GOWK? It's not even worth playing." We play from week-to-week to enjoy the game. We don't play just to boost our rankings, or see who can get the most wins. We don't play to be cutthroat. But out of 10-15 people at an LGS, there's a good chance that at least 1 person will run GOWK from week to week, simply because he's a decent piece. Now, if you know there's that chance, and you want to have at least some chance at winning your games, you have to build at least something in your squad to help deal with. And when it comes to GOWK, the only things that can deal with him are SO limited, that now the entire night of gaming because stale and boring. Because you either end up playing the same thing every week, or you end up getting killed every week.
All it's going to serve to do is destroy gaming groups as people get bored or irritated. I would predict that most groups wouldn't survive long enough for Rob to design and distribute an acceptable counter. And of course, that's assuming that said counter was just a piece of equal insanity level, further complicating problems (i.e. knocks GOWK out of the meta, but becomes a problem in and of itself).
OK, I've gone on long enough. My vote, purely for the fun and health of the game, and having nothing to do with GenCon at all, honestly, is to ban him.