The forums are not a hive mind.
 

I guess that's the problem with a continuously evolving and changing format - you're going to see changes that a section of players don't like or agree with.  What's good and fun for one player is going to annoy the heck out of another.  What one player complains about is going to be another's cup of tea.
It's probably important to remember that ships and pilots rotating out of Hyperspace is the entire point of the format - not to reach some mythical perfect balance point where everything is viable, but to regularly change up what players are using and promote experimentation.  Is part of that going to be about getting players to try the new ships on the block, of course it is.
I mean personally I've always preferred the "everything goes" nature of Extended, where the only thing that changes is the points value.

Hyperspace has been that since day one. It's an awful format. 

Now I finally get why you always are so mean to others ;D

Smaller donations to the Trump battle chest are going straight to his debt, the RNC, and his cronies. The larger amounts that have to be used in the legal battles are going to ... wait for it ... his legal team headed by Rudy Giuliani who is billing $10,000 per day. So, going straight to his cronies.
Its just one last fleece of his supporters, also costing the taxpayers, before he becomes irrelevant. The Republican party doesn't brook losers, he'll lose relevance once he's out of the office and McConnell doesn't need him to sign off on anything anymore.   

See
Epic was, flat out, very poorly marketed and released with mistake after mistake after mistake. It wasn't just 'People don't like leaving 200/6 for some reason.' Epic was released in a way that made it super clear FFG didn't care about it at all, and that means people aren't going to want to invest money into it or time into it.
Like I said, a huge part of marketing games or other entertainment products is trying to create the perception of a relationship between the end user and the product. Epic... didn't even try. Not a little bit. So its not a mystery of why it wasn't adapted. 
Saying 'people just didn't want to leave 200/6' is a classic marketing 101 blunder: It isn't the customer's job to like your product, its your job to get the customers to like your product. If people weren't hopping over to Epic, or enviromental play, like any other marketing issue, it is the marketer's fault for not understanding something or implementing their marketing plan incorrectly. If you just say 'The customer didn't engage with it' as a marketer, your going to get fired because your ENTIRE job is to understand your customer's behavior and make smart choices to influence it, which is why you do things like market research and try to understand the industry you are in. There is a clear desire for Epic, even among players who never played it, and Epic is a 'genre' of product in the wargaming community that tends to be super popular and generate excitement. The market was there, and what they wanted to do was an industry standard way to make money and generate hype. They just... failed.
In the case of Epic, the whoopsie in question was super clearly 'Bungle the release super hard it makes everyone really quite aware Epic does not have any real future on the horizon.' So even ignoring that hurting the sale of epic specific products, it also means people aren't going to try out the mode and invest emotional energy into it either. You can say it was 'just the dial on one ship' but an Epic ship is, for most consumers, a luxury purchase, and FFG's customer service department was just canned at the time, so it was still a mega-bad look that absolutely made every other problem Epic was facing (not being a launch product, clearly being unfinished, almost certainly not having future products because FFG kept mismanaging reprints) worse. Over-essentializing 200/6 as a mode didn't help of course, 2.0 launched in a way that sold its primary mode as AMAZINGLY inflexible (not launching with flexible totals, for example) that made selling ANY new mode really hard, but it still wasn't something completely insurmountable. FFG just looked at a small hill and said 'why bother we are going all in on 200/6 anyway' and didn't even try, despite various playmodes kinda... being REALLY important for both OP AND casual markets in most minis games.
As for environment cards, it feels similar: They were very much positioned as 'wacky side content.' They weren't super well integrated into how people 'thought' about X-wing, but there would have been easy ways to change that. For example, most wargames HAVE much less bombastic environment equivalents in tournament play to force lists to be somewhat versatile and adaptable, like Infinity and the T3 system. Obviously the existing enviroment cards vary in how appropriate they are for high level play and I think the OP community would revolt, but this is how most games do this sort of thing: tournaments don't have the wackiest stuff but tend to still have scenario based effects you can't predict and must be able to adapt too, which increases the skill cap rather than decreasing it.
But even just re-framing the type of content environment cards were without making any actual mechanical changes would work. For example, including a few minor environment cards in core would get you more primed to think of them as the 'core experience,' though that would require them to have the concept of environment cards when making core, which they may not have. Another way to 'push' environment cards would be printing a 'standard' environment card that is just the rules as is, but making it so you HAVE to select an environment card from here on out, so even though tournaments would always use the standard environment, every game in theory 'has' an environment, so saying 'wanna use a non-standard one?' is a bit less 'out there. 
The power of framing a product can't be understated. Subtle alterations to how you position what you are selling or advocating massively change the perception of it.

Bells.  Jango Bells.
 
Oh, what fun it is to fly in an up-gunned Firespray!!

"One of our focuses is using Organized Play as a vehicle to expand upon the core game experience through use of events that feature alternate game modes, highly focused narrative events, and an emphasis on equally rewarding everyone who plays, especially at the in-store level, where communities for these great games thrive."
Sounds promising!
https://www.atomicmassgames.com/star-wars-op-message

Gotta say, Meanie's take that "X-Wing put all its eggs in a tournament basket that collapsed once the pandemic hit and there was no momentum keeping sales going to other, more casual beer-and-pretzel home audiences" is much more likely than SOTL's "Asmodee is self-sabotaging their own sales to encourage sales of another game they own that shares an IP but plays completely different, requires a hobbyist/modeling desire, a higher monetary buy-in resulting in a net negative of potential customers." 

If FFG want to put new cards in an extension pack, I offer you these very useless card and fun  : 
I've made a French version too because I am French, 

Gotta say, Meanie's take that "X-Wing put all its eggs in a tournament basket that collapsed once the pandemic hit and there was no momentum keeping sales going to other, more casual beer-and-pretzel home audiences" is much more likely than SOTL's "Asmodee is self-sabotaging their own sales to encourage sales of another game they own that shares an IP but plays completely different, requires a hobbyist/modeling desire, a higher monetary buy-in resulting in a net negative of potential customers." 

I'd say 44/46. JFK was only 43. Considering you can't even be elected president until you are 35, he was pretty young for the role.

Gotta say, Meanie's take that "X-Wing put all its eggs in a tournament basket that collapsed once the pandemic hit and there was no momentum keeping sales going to other, more casual beer-and-pretzel home audiences" is much more likely than SOTL's "Asmodee is self-sabotaging their own sales to encourage sales of another game they own that shares an IP but plays completely different, requires a hobbyist/modeling desire, a higher monetary buy-in resulting in a net negative of potential customers." 

This.

Ive been refraining from posting here, because, as Obi Wan said “Im not brave enough for politics”. But now is as good a time as any  to share my thoughts.
As another opinion on the subject, I think its great that we all want the best for this game, even if we dont agree on what that is. Just keep in mind that were all here because we love this game. Keep the discussion civil. 
Overall, I think that communication is key here and because we dont have much of it (from both FFG and AMG), we have to make assumptions. Ride out the storm, as there is bound to be another announcement soon. Hopefully that will answer some questions. Remember:
Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the darkside (and great force regen on Maul...)

Yes, of course I look forward to every wave just as much as everyone else, and I look to see what I can now do that wasn't possible before.  I'm mean, I'm trying to win a game of XWM, so I'm "competitive". . .
BUT
I'm looking for different stuff.  A high IN generic with a talent slot gets me more excited than an Ace with a cool ability.  If Tycho were to jump back into the game, he's got to do 1 of 2 things:
A.  Stand on his own in a firefight with 8-10 opponents without support (that is a tall bill} or
B.  Function as a support piece for as many other friendlies as possible.  This is mostly what I'm looking for.  So, for 54 points each, Soontir Fel is a No, but Warthog is a dream.
Similarly, 1 Charge Talents like Crack Shot are a waste.  My Epic game is going to feature DOZENS of attack rolls, Crack Shot is going to have to come up at a perfect time to make it change the game.  OTOH, something like Marksmanship that is "on" all the time is totally worth 1 point.
And lastly, I'm thinking: "Do I want 1?  4?  6?"  Will it work in a wing??  And even if not, maybe I want several, because it is easier to play with multiple ships that have the same upgrades than everything being a solo piece.  My go-to set-piece for Resistance isn't Poe; it's a flight of 4 Black Squadron T-70s with Marksmanship.  At 200 points for the flight, that's like choosing something at 80 points for standard; plenty of room to design around for the rest of the list.
The part that's missing is the superset.  Everything that's Standard is Epic, but there can be stuff for Epic that isn't Standard.  Titles for the Huge ships; Commanders for the Huge ships; Teams, Hardpoints, Cargo.  Every wave gives Standard players a bunch of new upgrade cards; Huge ships have not seen a single new feature since the Huge CK kit dropped.  And it is pretty sad that 4 out of 7 factions don't have Titles or Commanders; FFG didn't "convert" the Raider for FO at all, they just gave it an in-faction dial and base.
Also, we've been teased with the design space of "Epic Only" upgrades like Dreadnaught Hunter, and then seen almost none of that come to fruition.  The Hyperdrive ring and the Jedi Commander offer some promise of change, but seriously, I can't get too jazzed about getting 1 card a year.
Also, as I pointed out, you could really scale some abilities differently for Epic.  Stuff that would be overpowered in Standard could be just fine in Epic because of distance and numbers dilution.
And as for seeing an actual new Huge ship "wave" to try??  Ha!!  They couldn't get the CR-90 right, and bailed on the Raider.  The only reason the C-ROC is better is that they couldn't forget the blue line this time. 🤣
I would have really expected a Consular Corvette by now. . .

Every time I come back I’m reminded that you’re all completely mad.

I'm so far behind this conversation 😅😔 Can I just say though, no playing, y'all keeping pretty cool about it all things considered for our usual antics. So we got that going for us, which is nice. I wish this was a discord discussion because I think we'd get further with it.
Since I'm so far behind, I'm going to just post loosely, because for me the truth is kinda in the margins of the positions so far made. In no particular order.
Epic is fine. Like, dang gurl u fine level fine. It had some weak spots. But anyone I've named to actually sit down and get to play a round have acknowledged it as good. The weak spots are fixable. A few things on Epic:
-It's new, like, brand spanking new. It hasn't gotten a lot of support because it hasn't had time too. Is that a drag for a player like @Darth Meanie , and to an extent me, who want to focus in that area? Sure. The HSRing? Not even something I consider because in all reality it could have been a standard piece and no one would have been any the wiser. But I don't think that's a problem. We get a Wing card, thanks for the nod, we're good. Any given wave had the opportunity to shake up Epic because it had content for epic regardless of what format it's branded for. That imaginably makes it hard to make content for Epic, on top of poor data reporting, since we can flip every single wave. We in epic land get ours in that way, just not in so many words. But in all reality, me and DM have so much to pick through still that we don't have any room to really complain yet. But we're getting there.
-One actual release a year of an Epic product (not a ring), we should be good. "Big Guns hardpoint card pack", "Captains and Crews cardpack", A Huge Ship, something, would keep us realistically happy.
-1.0 epic was sub par on a good day, 2.0E is making par on a bad day. Getting people to actually play a round of it, that's the hard part. Epic has this perception of being "too long", or "too complicated". It's not. Simple fact. Full stop. The scenarios special rules take about as long as a quick planning phase to resolve. And the games are not double like they used to be, often they're %150 a normal games allotment. If you dropped a lightly equipped Falcon into a normal standard list, you could actually be too much for an epic game. People don't realize this yet for whatever reason. 300pts is not a lot. And wings!? Turns one and two go by quick. As in between two players there might only be four activations level of quick. Not to mention most scenarios have a round limit of like 8 or less, and standard is like 12 or so usually. Public perception of epic scale and time, is wrong.
***On the comp-casual debate***
-There absolutely is a disconnect between the comp and casual sides. If nothing else was proof, this thread should be. I learned this all too well while playtesting a game for FFG a few years ago, not X-wing, (can't talk about much yet). For reasons I'm not certain I can legally describe, I quit playtesting for them. Because despite being a extremely involved casual player, event and community organizer, capable competition player, I was still 'just a casual' for their consideration. (Per my NDA, I am allowed to admit that I was a playtester for a product, but I'm not allowed to say much else, or ask for special treatment because of that prior status, or reveal playtesting process, sorry. I can't talk about future releases.)
***On ad hominem attack, you know who I'm talking too*** 
-Attacking the particulate reasons why someone feels a way about a thing IS attacking them, and not their point. If it was valid ground to attack a position based on the personal preference of the poster, than we should have ridiculed the Gunboat crowd back to the stone age for wanting something for themselves all those years ago. Selfish wants are not worthy of attacking just because they are selfish. The want itself may be debatable. But a beauty of the forum is that we can advocate our self, as well as our groups and sub-groups. It may not always come off palatable, but it is valid.
***On Aces High***
This was not a 'game mode'. It was a scenario for Epic, where it's rules are printed. Please stop trying to call it anything else so that we don't needlessly subvert Epic any further than we already have. But for your consideration, the fact that Aces High gets such focus should also highlight how players in X-wing tend to focus on low count, fast combat and don't care about real objective squad play. Personally, Aces High isn't even that good, and is probably far more prone to math than game skills determined outcomes. It's stupid to say "there was Aces High and Epic games at xyz event". Because there actually were "Two Epic scenarios to play at xyz event."
Sorry that you came to my Ted talk lol
 

No conversation has ever been more my wheelhouse on this forum than this one. I am going to try to give you a basic 101 level marketing course to help illustrate why FFG did so amazingly poorly at it I am literally adding it to my collection of 'what not to do' case studies. 
The fact you think that the 'beer and pretzel gamer' who bought a core set and 2 space ships has the same needs and outlook on the game as the person who is ride or die to tournaments booking hotels and tuning their list based on excelent data articles by other tournament players to ensure they can beat all comers in the meta after buying 5 new plastic spaceships per-tournament have the same needs, you are part of the problem. This isn't even a X-wing specific concept, this is called market segmentation, its a super basic concept any business utilizes to evaluate the different needs of different types of people in their target market. FFG could be selling a cleaning products and there would still be a need to consider how different people want to use the product, look at how Swiffer markets itself to two entirely different consumer bases: College Students and Busy Moms. Its just more important for ongoing collectable games because the necessity of creating a personal relationship with the product.
This isn't to say these two player types can't co-exist either. Most games manage it. MTG did some surface level market segmentation dividing the type of people who want to play complex collectable games into three types, Timmy, Johnny, and Spike, and the OP community is basically all Spikes. Your perspective is hecking valid, and Spikes are naturally a bit 'higher mantinance' but the fact that the attention of X-wing was almost entirely enveloped into the desires for OP players was objectively something that did way more harm than good. Because while you need to avoid making anything that actively angers spikes to the point that OP dies, you also need to kinda... ignore them when they complain about cards for Timmy or Johnny ever touching the OP meta, because the OP environment needs strategies Timmy and Johnny like too.
For example, 'you wouldn't like a game where control was good' is a supreme example of the Spike mindset, but in fact Johnny would LOVE a game where control was good. This was something a designer for X-wing unironically said which got adopted as a universal truth by the community on these forums that is, to be blunt, objectively wrong? We know from studying the market of collectable games for some odd 20 years. We actually have a pretty good understanding in both marketing and ludology that control would be an archetype many players find fun and the actual challenge isn't ensuring control isn't good, but ensuring control is good in a way that feels like your still rewarded for 'traditional skills' so valuable to Spikes.
Well if wishes plans were horses bud. Not launching with multiple game modes baked into the DNA of the casual 2.0 landscape was clearly a mistake. No one is arguing that FFG didn't have ideas to mix thing up. They are arguing they weren't a priority at ALL despite diverse play modes being a huge selling feature of collectable games in the market shortly before Covid. 
Part of the problem is that FFG... very openly treated Epic like garbage and didn't care. And that is bad, worse than Epic merely being 'not good' because, again, a huge part of marketing a collectable game is creating an emotional connection to the product. A really good way to kill that connection is for the product to feel like it doesn't care about you.
I can think of no way to do that faster than to release a long in demand product a lot of people felt should have been in the game at launch but wasn't (understandable), and then failing to support it in the app that is 'required' to play the game.
That is... as we say in the communications field, a, 'uhoh,' a big oopsie, a fall down the bad idea tree hitting every branch.
It was incompetence.
Product rollouts are a thing that you should be able to do. I am not saying any individual at FFG made the choice to be incompetent, but FFG as a whole was grossly incompetent during the rollout for Epic in a way that damaged brand perception in a big way.
The message your sending to the 'ultra loyal' casual playerbase, the group that is willing to make your product look as exciting and bombastic on store tables as possible and pay through the nose for doing so is 'your so much of an afterthought that not only did we not launch for this, but the excuse can't be that it was because we weren't ready, because we weren't ready now.'
And I know they were planning to rework the app. But you wanna here a secret? That is worse. It means that when they designed the app for this game they didn't plan ahead to include variant casual play modes at all. And they didn't care enough about Epic to go out of their way to update it before the launch.
Maybe they cared about epic a lot. Maybe their hands were tied, or maybe they had a rework to the app being worked on for day 1 and the timing didn't work out. But that doesn't matter. You can be the most benevolent well meaning company ever but your choices for how you release and market your products are what they are and the only thing the customer base is going to judge you on is the end result. You gotta actually deliver
And if your a 200/6 Op player? Sucks, you wanted to give epic a try, but it isn't too big a problem. But if you are a fan of epic, or a casual player who is dissatisfied with 200/6 and getting trashed by gatekeeper ships all the time? It tells you very clearly that FFG, intentionally or not, is not willing to invest resources into maintaining your good time.
This isn't the only big huge market segmentation oopsie FFG did, the great 'Go to **** OT players' issue is arguably way worse in terms of how to mishandle stewarding a product (Because, you know, not monetizing the OT isn't just a good way to make people feel like the product doesn't care about them, but is also a refusal to print money), but its a great example case because there is absolutely no excuse for how badly Epic was handled. The literal only conclusion you can draw from the handling of Epic was that it wasn't a priority and it was mishandled. The question is more 'how much do you care about that.'
There is no artificial division here. There is just a division. We aren't same team bud, and people on the forums have been trying to tell people like you that for a long time. Acting outraged that I am 'trying to divide the playerbase' misses the point, that you are in fact already standing alone. That doesn't mean we aren't one community, and can't co-exist, we absolutely should. All wargames NEED their OP communities, and those communities deserve to be happy and healthy. But holy crap do you guys not understand how casual players think sometimes, and the fact of the matter is you all really need to take more time to practice empathy. I am not saying you gotta agree with casual players or even think they are right, but the sheer level of scorn that oozes from OP towards certain things casual players want is... visible, and gross. 
Like, a meta example in this thread: Hey maybe stop telling the person who's primary concern is their favorite casual play mode is second banana in FFG's eyes when it super obviously is that they are wrong and just trying to stir the pot or cause strive. You shouldn't come at a disagreement accusing the other person of just being deliberately deceptive or inflammatory because that is a deliberate attempt to avoid engaging with their point of view. It means you aren't talking to them, you just want to be right so bad that anyone who has a different viewpoint and values to you has to be LYING.
Think about that for a second. Someone is telling you to your face that you don't understand them or their desires and has given a pretty clear example of that and why they think that, and your response isn't to say 'Oh I don't agree but its clear this is important to this player' but instead accusing them of some conspiracy to artificially divide the community. What is more likely? Darth Meanie is some weird agent of mischief trying to kill X-wing from the inside just... I dunno... because? Or Darth Meanie cares about different things than you and its hard for you to understand Meanie's viewpoint without first recognizing they want different things than you, and you refuse to do that to the point you need to invent a reason for Meanie to do what they did while still sharing your beliefs about the game.
Your conspiratorial mindset towards people saying "Hey Epic was important to me and shafted" is a perfect example of why you ARE out of touch. You just put it on full display here and its kinda amazing. "I am not out of touch, your just lying about what you want!"
And, again, I am not saying OP is not important, or that it should bend over backward for the casual player base. We shouldn't go back to 1.0's wacky nonsense just to appease the casual playerbase. What I am saying, though, is that OP is a bit more out of touch than it thinks it is, and some of the things it wants if perused too much hurt the casual player base. We SHOULD be same team, even if we aren't the same faction in the same team, but right now we just aren't and that is in part a listening problem and a refusal to engage with ideas you don't agree with in good faith. In fact, for a game to survive both sides of the community don't just need to exist, but be stoked the other side does as well. And that just... isn't the case at the moment.
TL;DR: Get a grip my dude, you are in fact out of touch to the point you believe people are conspiring to divide the community to avoid engaging with them telling you to your face that they think your out of touch. This doesn't make you a bad person, but it does make you kinda part of the problem, when ideally we should want every pillar of this community to support each other even if we value different things.

Gotta say, Meanie's take that "X-Wing put all its eggs in a tournament basket that collapsed once the pandemic hit and there was no momentum keeping sales going to other, more casual beer-and-pretzel home audiences" is much more likely than SOTL's "Asmodee is self-sabotaging their own sales to encourage sales of another game they own that shares an IP but plays completely different, requires a hobbyist/modeling desire, a higher monetary buy-in resulting in a net negative of potential customers." 

Gotta say, Meanie's take that "X-Wing put all its eggs in a tournament basket that collapsed once the pandemic hit and there was no momentum keeping sales going to other, more casual beer-and-pretzel home audiences" is much more likely than SOTL's "Asmodee is self-sabotaging their own sales to encourage sales of another game they own that shares an IP but plays completely different, requires a hobbyist/modeling desire, a higher monetary buy-in resulting in a net negative of potential customers." 

Gotta say, Meanie's take that "X-Wing put all its eggs in a tournament basket that collapsed once the pandemic hit and there was no momentum keeping sales going to other, more casual beer-and-pretzel home audiences" is much more likely than SOTL's "Asmodee is self-sabotaging their own sales to encourage sales of another game they own that shares an IP but plays completely different, requires a hobbyist/modeling desire, a higher monetary buy-in resulting in a net negative of potential customers." 

And you can continue to think how important you are to a game that is sliding off the charts because OP is no longer getting it done.  Your cohort of "hundreds of competitive players" has not kept XWM in it's #1 position on the miniatures charts, nor even kept it in the top 5.
****, the fact that you've gone tone deaf to what I have to say basically proves what @dezzmont had to say: