I have a lot of strong feelings about everything that Nick started with in his post and these subjects in general, as evidenced by my feedback on comp/balance/escalation units in the threads that popped up in December.
I am going to try to save a lot of text and boil my thoughts down into two main points:
1) I think we should see the "community" as broad, but not necessarily everyone who buys 40k products in Austin. There are some ultra-casual gamers that will only play in their homes with their 2 best friends and we will never see them at DL or at a tournament no matter what we do. There are kids who drop a lot of cash on the game at age 12, but will give it up at 14 and never play it again no matter what we do. I think community should include all 40k players in Austin who are interested enough in the game to be willing to be "organized" in some sense, meaning showing up to the store for pick-ups, showing up Thursdays, showing up for kids' 40k year after year, or showing up for tournaments. I don't think we do the non-"hardcore" crowd any favors by watering down tournaments too much in order to "attract new blood" or whatever vague sentiments pop up from time to time...casual gaming is always available at the store, and the tournament scene is there for people who want to get better, play good opponents, learn to play faster, play against tougher armies, etc.
2) At the same time, I think that virtually no one in Austin (be it the kids, the casual gamers, or the strongly pro-tournament people like myself) wants to go to the ultimate end of the tournament spectrum represented by the big cons, where 40% of the field is the top army, where half of the top 8 are the exact same super broken list, where you can't compete without a Titan, etc. insanity. This in turn leads to the necessity of having SOME home-grown rules and regulations to keep things from reaching that point locally + to make it clear to locals what the boundaries are for tournaments. While this will inevitably result in an imperfect local system that can't please everyone, over the last decade (and especially the last two years) GW's balancing has become so non-existent that I have gotten to the point where I would blindly consent to whatever comp/ruleset any dedicated TO in the country came up with over the default state of 40k at any given time. I personally REALLY like the Swedish comp system Nick posted a few weeks ago and think it's nearly perfect, and adds a fun dimension to list-building beyond just the normal points. However, at this point I would really take anything Nick, Chris, or even anyone on these forums decided to change in preference to playing 40k with its normal points and codex systems to date.
Edit: to add one more thing Mike and some others have mentioned in the tournament thread- get rid of the "must have a physical copy of the forgeworld books" rule. It's the worst rule we have around here, most people if not everyone hate(s) it, it's no longer consistent with GW materials, and it doesn't benefit either the person fielding the forgeworld stuff or their opponent
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