Rogue Squadron- Rise and Fall of the Triple Upsilon

FFG took the unusual step of announcing a small points change to X-wing buried inside a tournament recap.

Effective immediately, Lieutenant Dormitz has had his squad point value increased to 70 points, and the Hyperspace Tracking Data upgrade has been increased from two points to ten. These changes will impact both the System Open events at Eindhoven and AdeptiCon, as well as the Hyperspace Trials that begin shortly.

This is a really odd place to announce a points change. Unless their goal was to get more people to read the article? I know I probably would have just skimmed or skipped this one. If most people were like me then this news would have gone unnoticed.

Fortunately, the X-wing internet community exploded with this nugget being shared far and wide. Facebook, Reddit, Discord, local gaming tables. We live in an age where news can be spread quickly and easily.

So let’s look at the change itself. I’ve had the good fortune to not have to face a triple Upsilon list. I know I didn’t want to have to face it. It was a negative experience for a lot of people. Did this change need to happen immediately?

To that question, I say, why not? That was part of the reason for the conversion to 2.0. The ability to change things on the fly as needed. FFG has stated their intention is to adjust points every six months to account for meta shifts and things being added to the game. But that doesn’t mean they can only be adjusted every six months.

The ability to make a relatively small change to point values, and therefore redefine the meta away from a potentially broken combo is exactly what people hoped for when 2.o was announced. No more convoluted FAQ changes involving wording that comes out months too late. With this change, you can still use all of these ships exactly as their text says you can. You just can’t take the same combination of ships when you do.

Was this to much of a change? Maybe, but FFG can also scale things back in July with the next points update. Maybe Dormitz was the true problem and Hyperspace Tracking will come back down. Or the other way around.

But it’s cool that we have that option and that FFG is on the lookout for these kinds of things. We just have to hope they don’t get too trigger happy with changes. Just because something is good or popular doesn’t mean it has to be changed.