For me, it’s not about making it easier to win (though that might be a side effect), it’s about levelling the playing field so the we all have a fair shot at whatever price (be it a million dollars or just the bragging rights) that’s offered.

As for why I enter the competition... I don’t enter a competition in order to improve my skills. In fact, I’d say that competing is detrimental to learning new skills as the pressure of working under a tight deadline usually has me defaulting to the tried and true methods that I already master. A competition, in my opinion, is not the place to experiment...

But each to his own, of course...

The vibe I’m getting from this debate is that the “problem”, if we can even call it that, is that we have a disconnect as to what we’re looking for in the competition. Some of us want a level playing field and some of us want to be challenged as hard as possible.

Now, I do know that the plural of “anecdote” isn’t “truth” but please do hear me out...

A few years ago I tried to get back into wargaming via WarMachine. I played a few intro-games which all ended in my opponent going “now, this guy moves here, casts this spell on this guy, who now moves here and issues this order, which allows me to add xD6 to the damage of this model, who now charges your warcaster, thanks to the benefits offered by that guy, and... Ohhh, look... Your warcaster is dead. Thank you for the game”.

No, I wasn’t having much fun...

The problem, I eventually realized, was that the veterans thought that the only way to teach the noobs how to play was to hit them with every imaginable combo in the rules. But I wasn’t learning anything by having half my army wiped out by turn two and my warcaster dead by turn three... And worse than that, I was getting really disheartened by the never ending string of loses. So disheartened, in fact, that I left the game altogether and sold my models...

I think something similar is happening here. Some of us want to go slow and learn by competing with people of our own level and some of us feel that they only really learn when they’re challenged by competing against the best there is.

I honestly don’t know how to resolve this â€" after all, you can’t please everyone all the time. But I do think that it’s important to talk about it...

What I’m afraid of is that this competition will end up much as I felt about WarMachine back then. The noobs will feel so disheartened by the stiff competition that they’ll simply leave and seek out other forums and other competitions where they feel they have more of a chance.

Finally, let me just point out that I would feel the same had I been a veteran. If I have to compete, then I prefer to do so in a level playing field. Winning over noobs is just as unrewarding as getting thrashed by a veteran. Competition, in my opinion, is only really interesting when every participant has a roughly equal chance of getting away with the ’loot’...