Could we just go back to the excellent summary at the start of the thread.
I have shortened it a little but you can read the full text on the first page.
mordoten wrote:
So this idea came about when i saw the german epic communitys own rules that they where going to try out in their next tournament. But it has been in the back of my mind for a long time.
NetEA is supposed to be a community that gathers players around the globe that plays epic. As I have understood it ERC should be the spider in this global web that coordinates new lists, changes in lists and rules amendments.
To do this the ERC needs to have as much players as possible contributing with opinions, battlereports and new content.
This is in my opinion not a good thing. Here in Sweden the NetEA process and the ERC is mainly viewed as a very slow and conservative body that feels out of touch with the gaming community. The view I get when talking to players is that they feel that is very hard to get changes through and that the process feels very undemocratic where some AC:s seems to ignore the communities ideas and wishes and nothing happens.
And the splintering is the symphtoms to a bigger problem. And that is that the ERC has lost its place as a global coordinator of this unsupported game we all enjoy. And the more players groups splinter off from the NetEA, the less good ideas and thoughts about lists and rules will be heard and shared.
So maybe it's time to try and change the ERC/NetEA process?
Instead of having a very small group that calls all the shots and single AC:s handling every list we could do it in a more open, democratic and transparent way!
The Warmaster game . . . [snip]. . . in the Warmaster community.
We can do exactly the same with NetEA! We could choose 20-30 people from different parts of the world which have active epic playing communities (Australia, Germany, UK, France, USA and Sweden comes to mind) and give each community 5 seats on this new council.
We can then gather all the changes for rules and every list up into a document under a certain time frame and then start to try them out. But instead of demandning 6 battle reports from 1 gaming group we could get everyone to do 1-2 reports and then compare the data recieved. Lets face it, finding time to get 6 games in with work and family life isn't easy.
Also coordinating testing like this (”Febuary and March we will try out all the Space Marine proposed changes”) would make it easier to maintain focus to a certain list and not have 20 changes for 20 different lists being tried at once.
After discussing and testing a little the council could then do a vote on each change. To make a change go thru you could demand a ¾ majority to ensure that most of the community would agree on it.
I think there are a number of reasons behind the apparently slow development of NetEA lists, and the subsequent development of different ‘communities’ around the world, and they are not all to do with ‘splintering’ as described - language barriers is another for example. However I would say that historically, a lot of inertia was caused by different groups of people trying to match the apparent stats of given GW troops, a mind boggling mathematical exercise, and the question of list ‘balance’ remains largely subjective (and consequentially contentious). But as Epic draws away from GW in that sense, this major stumbling block should diminish in sgnficance.
So I welcome this attempt at bringing the global communities back together again.
The proposal also mentions doing things in “a more open, democratic and transparent way”, and also proposes a timetable for listing changes, testing them, and then voting on them. All seem a good way of going about things.
I was merely asking why this could not be done on a locked thread on TacComs which would provide the much desired transparency after all.
And if the community could see which lists and changes were being tested by the group, perhaps that would give sufficient incentive to join in with the testing and submit further reports. It would do no harm if no one helps - that is the current issue you are rightly concerned about, and extra testing may give you additional perspectives to consider.