It wouldn't let me post without a title. I miss those days.

I had a realisation the other night after talking to someone who runs a 40k club at work that day - Warhammer 40k has no place for me any more. Everything is so focussed on being "balanced" and hypercompetitive that I feel like the game itself no longer welcomes me. For me, it's always been about making up an army of my own and throwing it against an opponent and basically having a war of attrition while things get destroyed and memorable things happen, like you're playing a video game. But now everyone just cares about winning and all the terrain apparently has to be L-shaped ruins because they're the only "good" terrain rules and nobody cares about theme but about what's "viable". This has always been a thing to some extent, but it's been getting so severe over the last few years that "the meta" is all new people ask about when they want to pick up the game after reading things online. It's become a mess of quasi-homogenised forces where everyone takes the thing the internet says is "good". What value is there in playing against people whose sole focus and goal is to win at all costs when I don't even see the game as "competitive" but as adversarial - you play against each other, competing is a mindset where only being the winner will suffice. Age of Sigmar has the same problem but toned down, as the same people seem to work on both teams. The only place I have left really is the specialist games like Horus Heresy and Old World. I'm not super into Blood Bowl or Necromunda although I do have a team/gang for each of them because I find them a bit too board game-y. The internet has tried to make Horus Heresy and Old World hypercompetitive and done a better job with the latter, but it's far easier to ignore those people because I don't do much on forums any more and they're both designed by people interested in more story- and theme-driven games.