40K Deep Thought: Why We Complain
If there is something us 40K gamers LOVE to do – it’s complain. Dr.Bored digs deep and finds the culprits.
via BoLS Lounge emeritus Dr.Bored
Hello, Dr. Bored here, for something that hopefully will bring conversations more in line. My goal is for people to understand each other a little better going forward.
Let’s say you hear someone complaining about a dress that you like. The dress is a lovely shade of blue and has a unique hem along the skirt. This complainer says the dress is ugly and uncoordinated. If you heard that in person, you’d probably just pass on by, your mood dimmed a little that someone dare insult that dress you like. On the Internet however, people seem just as likely to pounce upon a complainer as they are to defend them, and rage wars begin…
…when at the end of the day, it’s all OPINION.
Or is it that simple?
I’m going to use two complaints that keep coming up. You can look around the forums, and in most posts, by the second page people have stopped talking about the original topic, and started complaining about something else entirely. Why is that? Why do these complaints keep coming up? Why won’t the complainers just go away for a while and focus on something that makes them happy, instead of moaning about things that don’t?
Let’s start with one very persistent one, despite it’s age…
The Sororitas Complaint
Sisters of Battle (Adeptus Sororitas) Still Don’t Have a Proper Codex!
Just about any time news comes up about a new faction or codex being released, you’ll see someone post something like…
“And still no Sisters…”
“Where are the Sisters of Battle?”
“Guess we can push the Sisters release back another year…”
To understand why these players can’t get over themselves, you have to understand a little aspect about gambling.
Yes. GAMBLING. That’s not to say that Sisters of Battle players are addicts to gambling, but rather victims of a similar system that, in many cases, they trick THEMSELVES into believing! Let’s break it down.
The common mode of thought currently is that Games Workshop is on the road to completing all of the Codices in their range, moving everything to hardback, and moving all metal and finecast to plastic. In the beginning of 6th edition, when Dark Angels and Chaos Marines got their hardback Codices, and we saw a similar trend in Fantasy, the conclusions were made almost immediately that everything would be moving to hardback. When the Stormtroopers (Militarum Tempestus) came out as a small ‘mini-dex’, hope rose that even those tiny aspects of 40k lore would get their own hardback attention! Fast forward to now, where Blood Angels, Space Wolves, even Harlequins have Codices and rumors of a new 40k force that hasn’t been seen since the Rogue Trader days is getting their own Codex, Adeptus Mechanicus, and you create the recipe for frenzied hope.
You see, there’s an aspect of gambling that keeps people interested. It’s called a ‘Variable-Ratio Schedule’ When gambling, you never really know when or how much you’re going to win, and machines and systems are often set up that give you a little bit at a time to keep you feeling like you’re ‘winning’. Not only that, but things like slot machines will make big obnoxious sounds and have bright flashing lights accompanying even small wins, while losses will be a quiet, short, soft sound that are designed so you’ll barely notice.
What does that sound like to you? Let’s see.. A rumor comes out that Sisters of Battle are coming… there’s a mad rush to confirm the rumors, with a topic exploding in hope and speculation.. There’s a system where, clearly, eventually, a Codex for Sisters will come out.. we just have to wait another month, another two months, just a little while longer, and we’ll get our Codex… The exploding forum topics? Those are the flashing lights. The unpredictable release schedule from GW? That’s our Variable-Release Schedule. The ‘promised’ reward? A proper Adeptus Sororitas Codex.
It’s unfortunate, but Sisters of Battle players and speculators tend to do it to themselves. It’s not completely their (tbh, our, I’m in the group too) fault. We’re set up with rumors that pan out false, and every Codex that releases we feel like we’re getting closer and closer to our ‘big win’, just like how a gambler feels like they’ll get closer and closer to a big payout if they just put in two more tokens, or five more dollars, or do three more pulls on the slot machine. It’s psychology at its worst, and it’s at least one of the reasons that Sisters of Battle players can’t stop complaining that they don’t have a Codex yet.
That said, let’s go on to one that, even after a couple iterations of new Codices, keeps coming up, ever since 3.5…
The CSM Complaint
The Chaos Space Marine Codex Sucks!
How many times have you seen this on a forum? The topic sometimes isn’t at all about Chaos Marines, yet somehow a Chaos player comes in to complain that their Codex is garbage and that they get treated like crap.
Yet, Chaos Marines made it to the top 8 at the 2015 Las Vegas Open!
How could they have gotten that far if their Codex is so bad? Not even NECRONS made it that far! Why won’t Chaos Marine players shut up about their Codex being so bad when there are clearly winning combinations?
I’m going to propose that the reason Chaos Marine players are having such a hard time points at the power of ‘Expectation’. It’s defined as “the act or state of looking forward or anticipating.” – It may seem obvious at this point. “Well of course, their expectations are shattered, so therefore they’re disappointed,” but there’s a lot more to it, and I encourage readers to give the following article by Bradley Foster on Expectations a glance for more:
You see, it’s easy as an outsider to look at an issue and dismiss an overreacting person as being dramatic, or needing to get over themselves, but the fact of the matter is that expectations can affect a person’s happiness, creating someone bitter at the state of things. Expectations can have an impact on relationships, work productivity, and pretty much anything that they’re applied to. It’s easy to expect that your microwave will cook your pizza in five minutes, and when it does, you’re happy, right? What if it doesn’t? Your microwave is broken, your pizza is ruined! Now you have to get a new microwave, or fix the one you have, and that just creates all sorts of stress.
Yes, we’re talking about a game here, not broken appliances, but microwaves can be bought for as little as $45.00 USD, OR LESS. Compare that to the price of a box of Chaos Mutilators, a grand $52.00 USD!
A microwave that doesn’t work… a unit that doesn’t work… We invest in these products with our hard-earned cash EXPECTING them to work. You see a nice microwave, it looks clean, the advertisements are good, so you expect it to work. You look at a unit in a Codex that looks neat, has a lot of things you like, fits your playstyle, and you expect it to work. What happens when it doesn’t? Bitterness, anger, frustration, stress.
It would be easier if we were talking about a game that didn’t cost so much, that didn’t take so many dollars or yen or euros or pesos to invest into. We buy these big expensive kits expecting that they’ll be a great addition to our army, and when they don’t perform like we expect game after game after game, we invest even more to try to build our army around them to make them work, and, lo and behold, they still don’t.
But this can be applied to pretty much every unit that doesn’t work in the game, so why are Chaos players more bitter than the rest?
Honestly, they put too much faith into Games Workshop. They expect GW to create a set of rules that will allow them to play, competitively, their Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh, OR Tzeentch army. They expected that they could make their Alpha Legion or Thousand Sons army work, because why wouldn’t it? When you make rules for something, it should be balanced and effective, right? Sadly, it’s not.
Remember the top 8 Chaos Marine player? Players like that don’t pay any mind to fluff or what they ‘expect’ to win. They make their winning combos out of what they have practiced to be effective, and a lot of times, the armies that go to tournaments look NOTHING like fluff armies. They are weird amalgamations of units, spammed, MSU, or otherwise that are min-maxxed or tailored to specific rules or strategies to make them as effective and efficient as they can possibly be. I have a feeling that the Chaos Space Marine/Chaos Daemons list that got so high at the LVO didn’t have Thousand Sons, or Mutilators. It probably had a Heldrake or two, and probably had some combination of Bikes and Spawn, and maybe even some Mark of Nurgle Obliterators. We’ll see when the list comes out, but I bet it won’t look anything like any Chaos Player that has read even a little bit of fluff would expect out of a Chaos Space Marine force.
That’s one of the big reasons that Chaos Marine players get hit hard by this effect over others. Space Marines can make their force ‘fluffy’ just by taking a Chapter Tactic that unifies their whole army, so no matter what units they take, it still looks consistent. Chaos Marine players have to pick out the best of their army to make a force that works competitively, and because of the weird range that Chaos Marines has become, from dinobots to psuedo-demons, to god-specific cult troops, it’s hard to really believe that some of these competitive forces would really ever happen in the 40k verse.
At the end of the day, yeah, it’s easy to tell Chaos Marine players to get over themselves, but when they’ve spent hundreds of dollars buying, dozens of hours building, and even more hours painting up their awesome Thousand Sons – it’s a little easier to understand why they’re so bent out of shape that they don’t work on the table the way they’d EXPECT.
Finding Harmony in 40K…
At the very least, I hope that this article helps people to understand each other, and helps the complainers to understand themselves as well. In a big way, I’m still a big complainer when it comes to these two topics, and I’m trying to better myself in order to find what makes me happy, and to improve as an artist, both in miniature painting and in my day job as well. I hope you had fun reading, and remember, don’t just bash and rage and flame, but try to understand each other as well. There are a lot of people that have a lot of reasons to be unhappy out there, and I’d like to think that the hobby, or at the very least the community around it, shouldn’t be another of those reasons.
What are your biggest 40K complaints and why?
