I wanted to touch upon something that has really bothered me over the last week or so. If you’ve seen our second battle-report for Star Wars: Legion over on MOTF then you’ll know what I’m talking about.

In a nutshell though I was on the receiving end of some above / below average rolls and my reaction was, well:

Now if you’ve been watching our channel for a long time you would know that not only do I ham things up for battle reports to make them more entertaining, but the level of salt on display in that video is also really out of the ordinary for me.

There’s definitely videos where I get mildly salty or jokingly over the top salty, but there was nothing reasonable or humorous about the way I was in that battle report. We’ve produced an incredible number of videos now and it is genuinely the only one that has ever made me feel uncomfortable watching as a reflection of myself.

I swear all the time, it’s sprinkled like flavouring throughout my dialogue, but the way I swear in that video when a particular roll didn’t go my way made me cringe. There was nothing pretend about it, and it was so full of self-entitled anger. How dare the dice roll this way!

This didn’t go unnoticed. Several commenters made mention of it. Someone I really respect even reached out to me and said something to the effect of, ‘Hey man, you should take this down, I love you but I had a heart attack from all the sodium’.

Now out of respect to the tremendous work Ken does, and to Nick for taking the time to play, we won’t be taking the video down, but my friend was definitely right and having that record is something I find really personally embarrassing.

Most gamer’s have a story of the time that they went completely, unreasonably, on ’tilt’. But, equally, no one wants to become ‘that guy’ in their community. The one who, because of their lack of emotional control, is a completely negative play experience.

Watching that bat-rep for me was like stepping into the cave on Dagobah, I saw only what I took in with me.

This was put into even further relief for me over the weekend. I was really fortunate to be able to take part in a fantastic tournament at the Rebel Outpost in Wyong (just outside of Sydney). In fact this reflection actually sprung out of me trying to write a tournament report for that event, I just couldn’t escape what was, for me, the angry elephant in the room.

The long and short of it though is that Lady Luck was almost unbelievably in my corner throughout the event. I played, for the most part, really well, but when I needed some incredibly improbable rolls to fall my way, they did.

Yet throughout it all, none of my opponents were anything but delightful, and even though they could make genuine complaints about the dice they didn’t. Or, if they did, they did it in a far more reasonable and jovial manner than what I had done only a week or two before.

If you are someone that goes on tilt though, that starts throwing their models around, getting angry, or generally carrying on like a good sort. I strongly recommend that you go and watch what you probably look and sound like.

It’s not a great look.

There isn’t a real grand epiphany or conclusion to this article. I let the hate flow through me, and upon reflection I disliked the person that portrayed me as.

Deep down I know that I’m an incredibly competitive person, but for me I never want to be that player (and we’ve all had a game against one) who makes the whole experience unenjoyable. I want to win, but more than that I want to be the kind of player I’d like to have across the table from me.

Hopefully I’ll slip into that Battle Meditation, and hopefully a few other salt mines might shut down for good. At the minimum if I think that’s not going to happen that day, then I’ll at least ask Ken to turn the camera off!

-Intel Officer Luke