I'd like to submit a nomination for the
removal of
Fulcrum from the WoS.
As of yet, I do not think there has been a map that has gone up for reconsideration for the WoS. I've spoken with some of the judges from the WoS about this map and they seemed to more or less agree with my thoughts, and after playing on this map the most out of any other maps at Scapecon East I believe Fulcrum does not hold up to the standards of the modern competitive map meta.
I was one of the judges Shurrig was talking to before considering this removal nomination.
I never was a fan of Fulcrum even back in 2011 when it was more popular and if I were an active judge when the BoV--> WoS votes were made my vote would surely be a no for Fulcrum.
Gonna be honest, my opinion on this map is well-done, I don't need to play bunch of games on it again or to wait one of the rare times when it is in a tournament pool. Gonna elaborate later on my opnion on the map, but I think the general opinion of players is more important, and Fulcrum is by far the most controversial map of WoS especially amongst the newer playerbase (players who started around 2018 and later). To them it's obvious that Fulcrum doesn't provide the competitive fairness that modern maps provide.
In my opinion WoS maps should be "blind-inclusion, everyone will be happy" kinda maps, and Fulcrum is way too much of a controversial map to fall in that category, people aren't gonna complain but some are gonna be sightly annoyed for sure.
Also imo Fulcrum in the pool have way too much of an impact on army building, WoS maps should be maps that you don't even need to check the map pool, your army will be fine, and this is always more or less true for all maps, it's always a grey area, and you could argue some other WoS maps are like that too, but amongst all the WoS maps, Fulcrum is in my opinion the most driving for army building.
Here are the flaws of Fulcrum to me:
- If you have range advantage, podding on the infamous level 3 triangle is just too much of a "I don't need do think" play. You also can block the acess with any 5+ move squad allowing you a 2 turns setup, with height and a lot of free attacks. No glyphs on the map gives no compensation to the melee player making this pod often an obvious play, causing the map to often play very similar in the range v melee machup. Jungle mitigates the problem a bit but isn't near enough to me. The whole islands are often deserted in those machups as melee can't get any use of them, Also this causes the map to heavily pull right, the left side is just to place figures dedicated to go to the center.
I think this map was fine back in the day because some players playing range would try to get to the hills as fast as possible and kinda throw the game up. I myself did this mistake and got punished, but I think the average 2023 player would not fall for this mistake. To be fair Fulcrum plays great when range is trying to get to the hills, but thing is, range do not often need to claim hills on this map. It can just sit on level 3 triangle and use the natural bottleneck of the map to its advantage.
- Having all your army pass through a single hex to cross the map is way too restrictive. Maybe people play the map wrong and should do more water dunking, but I've yet to see a high-level game where water dunking was effective, having to water dunk
2 times to cross the map isn't fun either and is way too restrictive except maybe for some exceptions like Deathchasers where you can water dunk before turn 1.
- As Shurrig said, dragons kinda break the map, having to fight dragons with melee on fulcrum just feels terrible especially when screened by Greenscales, if the entrance to the hills where a bit wider I may reconsider, but we just played a game with Chris where I had to either water dunk or go through a single hex to get to Nilf on an island and when you finaly get here, he justs switch hill lol, it just feels unfair. (I still won the game tho because my Q9 was sitting on the level 3 triangle), but it was crazy that my 4 squads of dwarves almost didn't get any damage done, not because they were rolling bad, but because they couldn't get any attacks off.
As opposed to what people may think this isn't that huge of a drawback to me beause problematic dragons are like 5/387 units (VC included) and other fly/simily-fly ranged figures are okay (you can argue airborne when playing full melee), but still is a problem to me especially in high-tiers formats.
I still think Fulcrum can be awesome in some machups and provide a very original experience and be completely fine in a well thought map pool or in a well thought format where its flaws are mitigated but in my opinion this quote from Shurrig sums it up very well:
However, time and time again this map has only further shown that its flaws competitively far outweigh its novelty in uniqueness and design.
To me Fulcrum does not provide the competitive fairness and the "guaranteed fun floor" required for a spot in the WoS, it's not like a bad map but it has too many flaws that can be abused and is way too controversial in the community.
I vote no to include Fulcrum in the WoS.
I do believe there were some downvotes previously per this point
