SkaredCast askes the question, would you throw a game? More after the break.
The SkaredCast post. Make sure you check out his blog, it’s pretty great.
On Sunday I posed a question to everyone on the editorial. What would you do if your opponent is already badly loosing the game from the start of the game? Bad rolls, bad deployment… these are some of the things that can sour a game quite quickly for your opponent. Now, I personally feel bad for my opponent (especially if they are being very vocal about it) and I usually start to make tactically “bad” moves. I will charge units that I should shoot, I would move units into the open to dash for objectives that are not important, or will forget to shoot with things.
This is not because I dont want to win, there is something about “overly” winning that I would like to avoid. There is no point for me to listen to my opponent whine for 2 hours and there is no point in them feeling miserable for that long either. The issue that I pose to you becomes even more complicated… say you end up loosing the game because of these “bad” moves or tactical choices, now you know that you could have continued to press the advantage and massacre your opponent (something that you should expect to do in a tournament in this situation) but in a friendly… what if it suddenly becomes something that is boasted on?! How would you feel and what would you do?Personally, I just shake hands, say good game “good comeback” and look forward to the next one.
I have, one hundred percent, thrown a game. Not to go on a tangent, but it reminds me of sumo-wrestlers. Let me back up, it’s from a passage of one of my favorite books- Freakonomics. In one passage they explore statistical analysis of sumo-wrestlers in order to identify cheaters. A study had been done and in a sport dedicated to honor, cheating was found to be rampant. Higher class wrestlers were purposefully losing to lower class wrestlers. Why? So the lower class could move up, if you don’t move up in the sumo world then eventually you’ll get cut out. Once the study came out, it rocked the Sumo world.
Now to bring it back to 40k- that study was about incentives. For the lower class wrestlers all the incentive was to win win win, for the upper class -as long as you met the status quo and stayed where you were, losing a couple wasn’t the end of the world. I have been in major victories and major defeats, and I can tell you the defeats easily stay with you longer. No one wants to lose badly, it just isn’t any fun. What incentive will your friends have to play if they know they are going to get smashed? /ragequite is never something you want to force on an opponent. You have someone in your gaming group- that Black Templar or Sisters of Battle player- that everyone just beats. Everyone has at least one of those players in their club. Don’t you want them to stick around? Consider throwing a game, or at least not winning so handedly.
