Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K: Why the ITC & GW Partnership Matters
Goatboy here – with what the new ITC & Games Workshop Partnership is all about – and what it means in the future.
While we all have the hints of the new Eldar book to have nightmares about I think the bigger news break from this past LVO weekend was the partnership between GW and the ITC. I am very excited about this as this game continues to move towards a better competitive future and with the company and the main leader of the competitive circuit working together it means that we as players can expect some pretty sweet things.
Back In the Old Days
I don’t know if you remember the ole times where events basically ran the meta with their off book missions, weird comps, and even crazy terrain options. This would have been back in the days of the earliest Adepticons, shortly after GW’s ‘Ardboyz circuit was ended. All of these things lead to a really odd set of tournaments where one thing that worked would not even have a chance to succeed at another. It also meant a lot of odd FAQs and house rules that could cause a lot of hurt feelings when we would rather just have fun throwing dice and knowing that everyone utilized the same rules.
It was a long road from those early days to now. Things like the oldschool “DakkaFAQ” in time would give way to regional rules-packs. Eventually the rise of ITC went a long way establish a unified set of rules for a lot of events all over the globe. But the sticky fact remained that these were still not “official GW rules”, but 3rd party ones. The partnership changes all of that!
Yay for Continuity
This announcement means that as we continue moving along this competitive line and look forward to more events we can expect things to be the same no matter what area we try to throw down in. I love the idea that we are really using GW’s rules and not someone’s thoughts on how the game should be. It has been over a decade in the making, but we have finally arrived. House rules are fine for the house but if we want to make this a serious event game we need to all be playing the same game. It just makes it easier for new players to get involved. It allows the event’s to just run the event and not “create” the rules for the event. It let’s players play everywhere which is important in how we get the game to grow.
Come On In, The Water’s Fine!
I would advise any player who wants to try and play a more matched play style game to try out an event. You make friends, get to talk about so many fun tournament things, and you get to see new armies. The friendships you make are important as it helps you feel like you are a part of something bigger than just yourself. It let’s you connect thru the glue of plastic dudesmen and titanic battles on huge mousepads of doom.
These next few weeks I want to go into some of the new Competitive things to think about this new season. As the game changes a bit we have to tweak our armies and create plans to help ensure we are winning a few games here and there. It also means a slew of new armies are going to come out to ruin our plans or tempt us to jump ship and start something new.
~Either way it is an exciting time and it is great to see this year coming together.
