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[sei]

How long 'till there're gaming clubs where one merely pays for the company and culture?

(Oh, wait Howie's, LAN centers, etc.)

[Mongrel]

For used items, that's perfectly fine.  Stores that deal in used items tend to be rare, usually will only hold items for well established customers, items must be of a certain quality, and the store expects a cut.  Typically trading used items online isn't too harmful.

Buying NEW items online, when you have a friendly local game store (FLGS) within reasonable distance that at least follows MSRP, you kill that store with each online buy.  Enjoy that deal you got, while you slowly run out of places to play.

If you consistently play hobby games in a store you do not regularly buy things from (More than just vending machine goods), you're doing it wrong, and you're killing a fun industry.  Thanks, jerk.

Luckily all the stores in Toronto are a combination of horrible (or non-exsistant) play environment and prosperous owners, so I don't feel bad in the slightest. In fact only one store downdown out of five or so actually even has any play space.

[Spaco]

The ONLY place to play anymore in Memphis is the GW Battle Bunker. Once it came in town, all other local shops were run out of business. I had absolutely no problem supporting the awesome local places before this. I used to play at the bunker pretty often when I was active, but I don't feel too badly about not giving them much of my money. GW's business model of turning a toy soldier game into a $700 required money sink has turned me off to the whole industry and I can't justify supporting a company I have grown to dislike. Besides, you can only play so many games with the same armies and the same six guys before it gets unbearably old.

[MadMAxJr]

GW Bunkers are strange, vary from city to city, and have staff that seem to be more cultist than employee.

I have heard stories of the St. Louis bunker having rules such as 'Play time on table limited to 3 turns, or three hours, whichever comes first.' also, asking to play a non-GW game is apparently a terrible idea, makes you a terrible person, and now they are forced to use marketing spiel tatic #47 about Black Templars.

[Burrito Al Pastor]

Which tactic is #47?

...And don't Warhammer 40k games last, like, four to six turns?

[MadMAxJr]

Which tactic is #47?

"But your game doesn't have these awesome guys in black with guns that shoot exploding bullets!" or "Those guns aren't nearly as cool or effective as the ones on a space marine!" or "Your game is bad and you should feel bad."

...And don't Warhammer 40k games last, like, four to six turns?

Or longer.  Roughly an hour per turn if you are playing 1850 or 2000 points, and you and your foe are relatively familiar with the rules.  This is a factor as to why I don't play 40k anymore.

[MadMAxJr]

So I went to go hang out with the owner at the local nerd store out here.  He's closed for the 4th so he bumped his Friday event to Thursday.  I came up to play a few rounds of miniatures, or so I had hoped.  His front desk guy had to leave at 8, and I didn't get there until 7.  Okay, fine, we chose to play Infernal Contraption instead.

I lose hard the first time.  We were playing downstairs, and his clerk had to go.  So we moved upstairs, where the M:TG guys were having their regular event.  We were playing a second hand, while he managed to run the store.  I was okay with the frequent interuptions, he's a nice guy and I know how really boring it can be to man the helm all by yourself.

This M:TG herd has an 'alpha dog'.  The alpha dog plays to win.  There is nothing else.  The alpha dog has the mentality that because he wins, he is better than everybody else.  The alpha dog is never wrong, because being wrong is for losers and the alpha dog is not a loser.

I keep playing my game with the owner.  Dammit, I'm losing again.  I am not using my cards right.  The owner keeps the M:TG rounds sheet on hand, takes the results as players come up and report.  When the round is over, he heads over to the counter to enter results, new round starts.

The alpha dog starts hitting up others to chip in for pizza.  Openly, around the owner.  Why is this a problem?

* The owner has a set of clearly visible rules, that no outside food is allowed.

* The owner has a freezer full of ice cream and microwave foods.  Also the necessary microwave.  He also has a soda fountain where if you buy the cup, it's all you can drink.

The owner catches wind quickly, "Uh, you can't bring in outside food.  Did you order it from (x)?"  x is a local small business joint, very close by.  He'd be okay with that, as he's a member of a local small business group.  Besides, it's the eve of a holiday, he was willing to be flexible.

"You know, I can go play at tournaments at any other store I want." is the reply he gets.  Again, the alpha dog is not getting his way.  That means he's losing.  The alpha dog immediately becomes threatening.  Bark bark bark.

I am saddened.  The owner caves.  He (the alpha dog) goes off to one of the hourly-rent-to-play PCs in the back, and tries to order online from the place he wants pizza.  He comes back twenty minutes later from what is a five minute process, and complains "The site said it's going to take two hours, I'm going to McDonalds." and gives the money back to those who chipped in.

Me and the owner continue playing our game.  God dammit he put that card right there.  RIGHT FUCKING THERE.  Aaaaaugh.  I'll never win this thing.

The owner takes results again to go finish out the round and start a new one.  A customer walks into the store and asks about some hobby game products for his kids, so he goes over to show him Heroscape.  This takes a little while, and the round isn't getting entered.  The alpha dog is annoyed.  I overhear, "God dammit, he's talking to that guy, I WANT TO PLAY."

The owner finishes his sales pitch, no luck this time, but the customer has some ideas on what the store has to offer him.  Not a total loss.

I wait for the owner to sit back down.  I've already packed the card game up, my own cards killed me before it got to his turn.  Stupid stupid contraption.  Anyway, I ask the owner to step aside with me into a whispering spot.

I ask him who the alpha dog is.  Seconds later before the reply the alpha dog barges over, past me to go outside, then back in and behind me to go downstairs, looking for his opponent.  Christ he's on a mission.  Wait for him to get back out of earshot.

I address the issue in a nice way to the owner, he's a bit of a pushover.  He can't slip foot to gamers.  You give them leniency on the rules once, and they will fucking abuse it.  I mention that the guy was talking crap behind his back because he wasn't serving the alphas immediate wants.  The owner chuckles to me and said this alpha once asked if he could work for the store.  We both had a displeasing sigh.  The owner gets the right idea, and is going to single the alpha out of the pack, and talk to him alone.

I'm sorry.  I understand there are those of you who want to play to win, but playing in a store is a privilege, not a right.  Just because you treat your foes like targets instead of human beings and you win all the time and you know you're awesome doesn't mean you get to walk all over the owner of the establishment.  When you cross over at the door, you agree to play by his rules.  You may not like the selection of food and drink he has to offer, the price may not be something you like, but this is what he CHOOSES to provide.  If you have a problem with that, he is probably open to talk about it.  Had you even asked him privately that you wanted to send out for pizza, he might have even been receptive had you ASKED FIRST.  No.  You had to turn around and threaten him with your continued business, because you couldn't get your way.  You make me sick.  You are one of the cancerous infections that plague hobby games and contribute heavily to the bad reputation therein.  If you can only be happy by making others miserable, I pity you.  I would have ejected you from the store and congratulated you on your decision to give your business to other stores, the nearest of which is probably a good fifteen minute drive south.

Some days, I think I should just write a book on the subject.  Or at least a blog.

[Kazz]

Here I'm imagining the alpha, having finally defeated every M:TG player in the world, leaning against his ten-ton golden trophy, winking at passing females, going, "Hey, wanna see my deck?" and then getting his shit kicked in by a cop.

[Brentai]

I'm imagining the alpha pulling out THREE! BLUE-EYES-WHITE-DRAGONS!!!!!!   I think I've been watching too much of this show.

[Shinra]

when I lived in the greater detroit area the girlfriend and I went to local WOW TCG tournaments. There was a scrawny nerd, full raging neckbeard and patchwork goatee, with orange-black teeth who smelled like pigshit and judging by the grease in his hair, probably used it as product. He won every tournament when he could - if he got beaten, he would literally walk out of the tournament. More than once, this fucked me out of getting a t-shirt or a free booster pack. (consolation - when you're playtesting your deck you tend to lose most games. If you're not dead last or in the bottom three you get shit. Forfeiting automatically gives all of your future opponents wins.) More annoying than this was, I got to watch everyone ELSE have fun for 45 minutes while I sat there playing grabass waiting for the next round to start so I could start playing again. A couple of nights I ended up only playing one or two games because of assholes forfeiting.

I played him once. Nearly beat him. He started telling me off about my hero, and my deck choice, and I explained to him that I played the decks that were fun. He retorted with, 'hah, but I play the decks that don't suck.' The dickwad was basically playing the same deck that everyone else who is obsesssed with their player rating plays. He didn't really give a shit about it being interesting or not. After he left later that night (he lost a game) the guy next to me bitched about him basically getitng all of his 'skill' from www.printmydeck.com. The other big time player there was always a really nice guy. Played original decks. Usually won, but when he lost it was always because he was doing something different. Paladin combo decks. Melee hunters. Stuff you didn't really expect. He was a cool guy to hang out with and played a good game pretty much every time.

Every game shop has an environment like this. When you're dealing with all high school outcasts, one or two of them are bound to have a chip on their shoulder., Maybe they think that if they're winners in WoW/magic/warhammer, in this clique, small environment, they're winners at life. It's kind of sad. I'd feel bad for them, if they weren't such intolerable assholes.

[sei]

On the flip side, people who play gimmicky, ineffectual bullshit will often use it to excuse their losses.  I wouldn't be surprised if there were some kind of related slogan.  Maybe something like "You can only really lose when you try to play to win," "You can't lose unless you try to win," or "The Tao is a cock."

[McDohl]

The Lone Star Comics about 10 minutes from my house qualifies as "nerd store" in a loose sense, but there's a chain of them around the Dallas/Fort Worth area, so I don't think it falls in to the 'brick-n-mortar' category.  Anyway.

I like the atmosphere there.  I was sitting around (filling out a job application ), and we got in to a silly debate about the meaning of words like "palindrome", "onomatopoeia", and so forth.  It was quite entertaining.  That's actually only the second time I've been in the store since I got back home.  Depending on what sort of events they have going on, I might go back on a regular basis rather than just to check what new D&D crap is there every month or so.

[Shinra]

On the flip side, people who play gimmicky, ineffectual bullshit will often use it to excuse their losses.  I wouldn't be surprised if there were some kind of related slogan.  Maybe something like "You can only really lose when you try to play to win," "You can't lose unless you try to win," or "The Tao is a cock."

That's the thing with the wow tcg; every strategy at the time was reasonably valid. The problem wasn't ineffectual bullshit vs effective bullshit, it was a couple of decks that exploited poorly worded game mechanics to be unbeatable. See also, holes in tournament rules. His deck was a stall deck, and between taking turns very slowly and using cards to build an effective stalemate, he could insure that he was at a slight advantage at the end of every game, or his opponent quit in disgust. He didn't win in a way that anyone considered fair. He won through bullshit exploitation of rules-as-written.

I understand that the deck fell apart once it got to the big tourny that year because they established a flat time limit on how long you could spend taking your turn, and instant disqualification if you were stalling in anything other than a card-based strategy. Taking extra long to draw your card, or 'hmming' when you clearly don't have anything you can do was apparently grounds for being thrown out of the tournament you flew half-way across the world to participate in. As a final kick in the ass, the last set of the tournament rounds were done as a round robin sealed deck, so noone could use their card albums to build a deck that was good at abusing broken game mechanics, since the card availabiltiy would not be there.

My deck at the time, by the way, used a human warrior hero, and focused on allies. I used the human racial ongoing to get cheap allies out and used another ally to instant summon high powered allies from my deck, then used battle shout and commanding shout to make them beefier and hit harder. It got to the point where I could cycle out five+ allies a turn. The problem was, against a stall deck I never had the opportunity to get my late game power going. during the early portion of the game I was strong if I got the right card draw, but I could never shut down a stall deck once it got running. Noone could. That was the problem with stalls - you could really only beat them with luck, or a deck that was designed in such a way that it could ONLY beat stall decks reliably, by stacking the early game so much that you could shut them down with disposable allies before they started abusing their totems and draw prevention.

[Büge]

Welcome to Magic: The Gathering, twelve years ago.

[Kazz]

I played a guy in Blokus Duo online recently who copied my every move until the very end, when he played a slightly bigger piece than I did and won.

[Mongrel]

Welcome to Magic: The Gathering, twelve years ago.

My thoughts exactly.

[Royal☭]

The Lone Star Comics about 10 minutes from my house qualifies as "nerd store" in a loose sense, but there's a chain of them around the Dallas/Fort Worth area, so I don't think it falls in to the 'brick-n-mortar' category.

Keep in mind, those are the only Lone Star Comics in existence.

[S D S]

Of course, just my luck... the Lone Star in Arlington proper moves closer to our house...

..and we're moving further south into Arlington this week. 

[Royal☭]

How further south?  This is getting creepy, as at the end of June I will be living in South Arlington as well.

[S D S]

Kinda near S. Collins Road and East Park Rown, near the Parkdale and Arlington cemeteries.