Variance, Oliver Pocknell, Niels Vos, Scyks and Pack Rats

juxtaposition

noun: the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.

eg. "the juxtaposition of these two images"

 

Exhibit A)

Exhibit B)

What's going on in these two pictures?

The first picture is a screengrab from the final game of the Mustafar Hyperspace Galactic Championship Qualifier (from the last weekend of October), and in the chat box on the right you can see how much the audience watching the game have been enjoying it.  I was actually watching the match live right along with everyone else who is participating in that chat and I can attest to just what a fantastically exciting match it was.  It featured Niels Vos playing the same Fangs & Scyks list that Akhter Khan succeeded with during lockdown earlier this year (and which I had played at the Milton Keynes System Open in February) and he was up against Ben Doyle's Boba/Fenn list.  It was a great game that saw Niels take an early lead by pummelling fire into Boba Fett and landing a Structural Damage critical hit, only for several turns of bad dice variance to rip victory away from him and hand it to Ben after he'd managed to protect Boba while Fenn deleted a couple of Scyks.

The second picture is a screengrab of what reigning World Champion Oliver Pocknell posted to Facebook just a few hours after the Swiss rounds of the Mustafar Qualifier had ended.  Ending the tournament with a 3-3 record was the final straw that broke the camel's back and we saw the frustration that I know Oli has been struggling with for a while come bubbling out.  Oli has long been concerned at how cheap and effective some of the generic pilots are and has watched the repeated points drops they've received with growing concern.  Generic pilots tend to bring few abilities that would reduce the impact of dice variance, often taking a single focus token to cover both red and green dice with no rerolls or linked actions.  To quote from his Facebook post: "What is great for the casual player (variance making everything a large unknown going into each engagement) makes the competitive game incredibly difficult to play consistently".

And yet... that very variance is why the final game of Mustafar was so exciting.  The game swung back and forth over the turns and every time players picked up their dice the whole audience watching were on the edge of their seats.  There was one turn in particular where Fenn Rau destroyed a Scyk in one shot then rolled precisely the natural Evades he needed to see off both a Tractor Beam and Ion Cannon attack from two Scyks that would have ruined him.  The crowd elated and groaned in equal measure at the fortunes of the dice...

I was unashamedly rooting for the Scyks - it was my list after all, and one of the two games that I'd lost at Milton Keynes had been to almost exactly this Boba/Fenn squad and saw me get almost exactly the same sustained run of extreme variance.

The Beginning

I reached out to Niels Vos and we talked about several things: list choice, variance, and even Oli's Facebook post came up.  Interestingly, even though I'd approached Niels because he'd suffered such a bad run of variance the first thing he told me was that variance hadn't cost him the match!

"If you watch that match there's one turn where I make a sequence error and that cost me the game.  I moved a Cartel Spacer before my Fang and then bumped the Fang.  If I hadn't bumped then that Fang would have Focused and Boosted and had a range 1 shot on Fenn Rau.  So I don't blame variance for the loss - yes I was unlucky on dice, but I was also really lucky when Boba Fett pulled the Structural Damage critical hit because he hates to see that. It's probably the worst crit Boba can have.  Variance always balances out.  In an earlier round I won a game by one-shotting an ARC with four natural hits into a blank green dice so when Fenn one-shotted my Scyk that was just balancing what I'd already benefited from earlier."

This echoed my own experience at Milton Keynes - I had a bad day of variance on the Saturday then it flipped on Sunday and a following wind of good fortune swept me to an unbeaten record, top MOV and a ticket to the World Championships that never were.  It's not easy to maintain that longer view of variance when you see those blank green dice staring up at you, though, so all credit to Niels for that.  

But it turns out Niels is comfortable taking his chances with variance, and as conversation moved on to talking about Oliver Pocknell's post, it turned out that Niels was the perfect person to be talking to once again!

"Last year I was playing Torkil Swarm - you know Torkil with Seevor and the three Kihraxz - and I liked that list because I always felt like I was the strongest jouster in the metagame at the time.  I could joust anything head on with that list.  I played it at Worlds last year and I won Belgian nationals with it as well."

 

"I actually played against Oli at Worlds.  He was flying his Imperial Aces while I was playing the Torkil Swarm and I actually won that match.  I really enjoy those type of games  against aces, to be honest.  They're trying to get the perfect engagement with range control and escape, just chipping away at my ships and I'm trying to ensure that I get the chance I need to trap his ships and get shots on them.  I think they're interesting games, and yes I don't get many shots in the game and I need variance to help me make them count but I'm having to play well to get those shots and those chances.  And I'm not sure the generic lists are 'high variance' anyway - you roll lots and lots of dice over a game and the more dice you roll the more likely it is that the results are going to average out.  It's a different way of looking at variance."

And it's exciting, right? 

"Oh definitely.  I've been practising for Coruscant with some friends - I'm going to fly the same Scyks and Fangs squad at Coruscant and we were playing some games against 5 A-Wings to practice and in those games you're just throwing dice all the time.  Like you're throwing 50, 60, 70 dice over the course of a match and I love games like that.  When you throw that many dice you're going to have some good luck and some bad luck but it's going to be a great game."

So is Oli just wrong to have said what he did?

"No, I understand Oli's frustration and I see what he is saying.  I think there's a few ships that are too cheap now, like the Wookiees are too cheap, probably the TIE/fo and the Cartel Spacer are a bit too cheap and those ships are really good against the way he wants to play.  I think overall the game is in a good state, though, like aces can still win.  And I prefer this to what we had in 1st Edition when the dice were almost pointless as everyone had all the modifications they needed to just make the dice whatever they wanted.  I feel like, you know, X-Wing has dice, right?  It's a dice game and that's a big part of the game we're playing that we don't know for sure what's going to happen."

"I think you saw some frustration from Oli that he's tried a few times to qualify for Coruscant and missed out each time.  I actually like the Dash/Wedge/Jake list that he played at a couple of qualifiers, it's a good list, but I think at Mustafar that B-Wing and Y-Wing squad he used is probably just not a very good squad.  I think Wookiees are too cheap but my squad would love to play against them and Oli's list just looked a lot like a bad Wookies list.  And there are players who've been successful consistently, like Faan did and Akhter did, there's good players doing well in these events.  I think if Oli had stuck to his aces he probably would have qualified for Coruscant because aces are still really good.  We tried it just taking Whisper out of his World Champion squad to use Echo instead and once you learn how to fly Echo... that list is still really good.  "

So there you go, I didn't know it going in but it turns out Niels Vos and I are twins separated at birth and I doubt I could have said any of that better than he did.  I know why I'm playing Scyks for example - it's because I think they're too cheap and are really good!

The Middle

There's one other thing that I want to pick up out Oli's Facebook post and talk about it some more.  It's in the quote that I've already repeated, but let's look at it again: "What is great for the casual player (variance making everything a large unknown going into each engagement) makes the competitive game incredibly difficult to play consistently".

But is it just the casual player who benefits?  Certainly Niels Vos isn't a casual player, he's a national champion and made it into the cut at the last World Championships.  Faan Langelaan and Ahkter Khan aren't casual players either and both stacked up repeated success with squads of generic pilots and Focus tokens.  I don't have any of the major titles to my name that those guys have but I'm not a casual player either, I'd like to think I'm a student of the game and I make my decisions based on a pretty good understanding of how the game works and where I will give myself the best advantages.  I didn't invent the squad that Akhter and Niels have used to such success because I wanted to flip coins to see who won, I invented that squad because I'd done a lot of maths and worked out that the squad was likely to give me a significant advantage.

So it for casuals, or is it also for good players who just happen to have a different skill set?  Maybe.

And as Niels said, is it really a higher variance strategy anyway?  Rolling lots of dice is, in itself, a form of controlling variance.  It's not what we've been used to as 1st Edition was all about powerful Evade tokens and passive dice mods like Expertise and Glitterstim, but spreading your bets across so many more ships and shots is a valid way to mitigate risk.  One bad roll of green dice can end Soontir, Fenn or Vonreg's day real quick but one bad roll of the dice with a Cartel Spacer and... so what?  I've got 5 more ships left and the game is very much still on.  As we saw in the final of Mustafar it often takes repeated bad variance turns to overwhelm the sheer natural efficiency of the Scyks and Fangs.

And finally.  If there IS more variance as a result of generics being good now.  And if there IS more casual players beating good players.  Is that actually a bad thing?

I poked Oli about this assumption in reply to his Facebook post, and his reply was that there were some players who were so good that he would expect them to be going 5-1 every time they play.  There has to be something wrong with the game if this isn't happening.

Oli also went onto the Thule Squadron Radio podcast last week (which is a particularly interesting listen as they were recording when the Nantex points were changed and you hear them take in the breaking news) and he said that currently he feels like he's only winning 70% of games because of player skill and in the past it was more like 85% of games.

And that makes me uneasy for a couple of reasons.  In the first instance I'm not sure about the assumption that a couple of players are so far and away better at X-Wing than anybody else that it means the game is broken if more than one person beats them in a 24 hour period.  It might be true and I've not got direct experience of any of these players to say if that's right or wrong.  But it makes me raise an eyebrow.

And in the second instance, let's say that is true and that until now skill has been the sole determining factor in 85% of games and now it's only 70% (to use the numbers that I'm sure Oli wouldn't want to see set in stone as he was just shooting from the hip in a podcast, so apologies to him that I'm nailing them down like this).  If this IS true... I think skill being 85% of the game and players being all but guaranteed to go 5-1 is a problem and it's bad for the game.

Because while that works out great for the guys at the tip of the iceberg who get to win time and time again it sucks for everyone else.  Who wants to play a game where you know you can't win?  Looping back to where we came in you can see just how exciting variance and uncertainty is, but it's more than just exciting it's egalitarian too.  It spreads the wealth of prizes further and wider than it might otherwise get spread.  More people get to experience what it's like to win.  Better yet they get to experience what it's like to beat somebody like a World Champion (and be absolutely buzzing from doing so).  It makes for a healthier game - one that's both a better spectacle to the observer and also more rewarding for more players.

Variance is often talked about like it's a one-way street where More Variance = Bad and Less Variance = Good, but I think most game designers you talk to would say that actually there's a sweet spot you want to hit with this.  You want to reward skill but you want to allow upsets to happy relatively often because it keeps more people more engaged with the game over a longer period of time.  

And games have died and gone away when they got that mix of variance wrong.  The original VS System card game was launched to huge fanfare and an ambitious competitive scene with huge prizes off the back of marketing itself to professional Magic: The Gathering players as 'Magic without the luck'.  VS System won several Game of the Year awards for its design... and then it died after only a couple of years because it turned out they'd made a game where the person with the best Maths degree pretty much always won.  So everybody else stopped playing.  (VS System has since returned as a Living Card Game though I don't know if they changed the gameplay to increase variance).

And Magic itself has a storied history with variance.  The dreaded 'Mana Screw' (variance being so poor you simply cannot play your cards at all) is often cited as bad game design, a legacy of Magic being such an old game before people knew how to make games properly.  And yet when Wizards of the Coast launched a reality-TV style 'Designer Challenge' with the prize of a job designing Magic cards one of the initial qualification questions was "Explain three positive ways Mana Screw affects Magic" because WotC understand that variance is important and that uncertainty is exciting.  

On another occasion, during design for the Return to Ravnica expansion, their playtesting revealed that the set was incredibly well designed for Limited play... too well designed in fact, because the best players always won.  WotC deliberately designed a broken card (Pack Rats) and inserted it into the set as a way of curbing the guarantee that the best players would walk to victory every time.

The End

So I don't know if skill used to be 85% of X-Wing and now it's only 70%.  But if it WAS 85% then I'm glad it's now only 70%, which feels like it's still making skill an important factor but leaving the door open to exciting upsets, or to players like Niels whose skill in X-Wing comes from being able to adjust and adapt when uncertain outcomes go against them.

Personally, I've got a feeling that a lot of Oli's struggles in these qualifiers stem from him picking bad squads and trying to swim against the flow of what's good right now.  Flexible points costs for ships mean the game can change direction more dramatically in Second Edition than we're used to and I think players are being rewarded if they can bend with those changing winds of fortune.  

And I prefer to look forwards not back.  Our reigning World Champion may not be playing at Coruscant but a lot of great players will be, and I'm sure we're going to see some incredibly exciting games where it's hard to call who is going to win.  And that's going to be great.

I'll be rooting for the Scyks.  ;-)