GW Grognard: Sometimes you need to step away

Hey everyone! Adam, from TFG Radio, here to help you make lemonade!

As we have seen through recent years, 40K has grown by leaps and bounds. Today you can realistically create and run a small grand tournament in a short amount of time, and have a good event with a good number of people. This increase in events, along with social media, has caused players to become known to the general competitive 40K crowd. Over the years, many names have sprung up as the ITC has grown. Some have faded as time moved on, while others continue in their conquests at the same time new players climb the ladder to hopefully stand at the top. The flip side of this are those players that evoke a strong negative reaction from players, either through their actions on the tabletop or even off the tabletop but while at an event. There are a few names you hear about all the time, and come up at almost every tournament they attend. This bad image of a player will sometimes haunt them for the rest of their 40K career, but what are they to do if they sincerely want to turn that image around?

If someone were to ask me, my first instinct is to tell them to step away from tournament play. I don’t mean to give up 40K completely. I mean to just not participate in tournaments as a player. With the current state of the tournament scene, there are plenty of other opportunities for you to still be involved without playing the game. Hosting a podcast, being a judge*,  or being a commentator for a Twitch stream, are all some of the ways to still be part of the community and engaging the public. I would advise you to not attend any major events for a couple of years and just play some casual games where you aren’t trying to use the most edge case combo you can find. After a few years you can then ease yourself in returning to the scene. In this process, i would still advise building strong armies but maybe not build armies, or playstyles, that remind people of how you used to be.

Now some people simply can’t do that. They still want the fun and excitement of participating in a tournament. In that case, I would advise that they give themselves a handicap in that they play an army that is relatively straight forward to play and is a somewhat mid tier army. They don’t try to chase the dragon and go with the most recent hot list or try to use some weird reading of a rule to get an edge when this one very specific case happen. Basically you try not to do things that may appear shady. The reason for this is that by attending events, most people will be wary of you from the get go and are looking for the slightest reason to call you out in the court of public opinion. Even if what you’re doing is on the up and up, the fact that it just seems shady will cast doubts about you and your sincerity to change your ways. Basically, if you want to convince people that you want to change, you need to show them that with your deeds, not your words.

That’s all for this week, I hope you enjoyed the read. Let me know your thoughts, and what you think a person can do to change their image, in the comments section. Don’t forget to visit our Facebook, Twitch, and Patreon pages to stay up to date on what we’re up to and when episodes drop!

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*Although I don’t think people would trust your decisions