This is a post ripped directly from this video herehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aDjSgndGU8
3 year player of DE here; in terms of local meta down under, west coast at least there's like 2 other guys that I 'have seen' that play DE but don't see them any more. Much more common to see Tau or orkz represented alongside the obviously large player counts of SM/CSM.
Well my army lists generally boil down to 3 formats.
Those are:
1. Archon/Kabalite list with assloads of poison shots and reavers
2. Wych heavy with some scourges OR beast masters
3. Haemonculus type list with a solid representation of wracks, a couple of talos' and maybe some trueborn for anti-tank.
As a disclaimer I last played before the launch of 7th ed, due to waning interest on my own part and the fact that most of the players in my area are teenagers of varying ages that turn up to paint rather than to play. Also comp scoring needlessly penalising me for playing what I want to play (despite you can see the obvious themes) eventually just switching me off from playing with basically a bunch of babies that only wanted to compete with me when they brought their FOTM list from their latest Ward dex.
And in playing 2v2 where it was DE/DE-CE vs nids/orkz and my ally took flyers and a blinged out archon, seer council etc while I took my kabalite list I noticed the general animosity for DE from the spectators (like 11 or 12 guys including the store manager). Ok so my partner didn't really accomplish very much while I held a very definitive hold on the centre of the board just due to the horrific amount of poison and ap2 I could wield. This is where the animosity was brewing. I got called a "hard player" i.e. a player who doesn't "obey comp" and a guy who plays to win. I think that because I've been playing 40k for like 7 years it gave me a chance to really show how I built lists and put them to effect. I think out of 10 games I lost like 3. Now I have taken a 1 year break from the game and I'm ready to step back in and stomp some heads but when I do show up to see what's going on in the FLGS it's still just the same sad faces playing the same sad lists that I beat easily before and noone is really evolving their game in any meaningful way.
Can anyone see the problem with what I'm saying? I know I'm a douche, but I'm not a WAAC player I write my own lists and double check everything to make sure it's legit there are no underhanded moves or rule-bending tactics from me. When I play against these guys I just feel like I'm playing against guys who really want to prove they're better than their peers but that they are like an inbred fish pond that's scared of new ideas and new armies and tactics and that DE is that big scary pike fish that comes in and wrecks their shit once in while and they don't make any attempt to learn anything other than (at least in the past) having a specific list written up to defeat me and only me.
I think this is one of those things Stelek felt before he threw in the towel on 40k, at a time where 5th edition was still going strong and everyone was playing a variation of his spacewolves list and he was just defeating nearly every opponent he had and the despair at noticing how noone was learning anything and just brought the same shit armies and the same shit attitude to the table every game and then in order to deal with constantly being beaten they deflected their failures on to the spacewolves and on to Stelek instead of adapting to the change in difficulty and really reworking their army somehow. And that's how it is in my local ecosphere, DE are seen as a cheese-race and are used as a scapegoat for not wanting to play even on a day that they brought their models or even worse for me was agreeing to playing a game and then "forgetting" to bring their models or whatever (dat passive aggressiveness). So some other plucky young soul steps up to the plate and we duke it out and what happens happens but still there is this fear against DE. Even the other DE players got shunned by association too and now they don't even show up or just play SM. I wasn't even the first guy to be playing DE there but when I moved to the area and brought my army to bear that cemented things I think. The first time I pulled out my army the reaction was "uh oh" and at the time I laughed but now I feel sad because DE aren't even very good against armour heavy lists but they insist on bringing their green tides every time.
