@darthcheese the rules said that refusing to play an opponent gives that opponent an auto-win.

No ifs, no buts, no coconuts.

If a player had wanted to he could have abused that rules by doing exactly what that kid did :
dress up as a nazi or something equally offensive
make statements to the effect that you support them (especially if said opponent won’t play his enemy faction)
and thus annoy the shit out of 9 out of 10 opponents
Psychological warfare works and you need to arm yourself against it.

Sportsmanlike ? Hell no.
Effective ? Damn right
Can any of this be proven ? Nope … you do this subtle enough and they can’t lift a finger.

Tournaments can and will be won by rules lawyering the shit out of a game.
And as we’ve seen in actual sports … the teams will do the same to the tournament rules, because winning at any cost is super effective even if it is morally objectionable.

GW really are about 20+ years too late with a statement such as this.
It would be less silly if they had voluntarily accepted a ‘Mature only’ rating for their games in order to indicate that the subjects of their game aren’t exactly ‘kid friendly’ … but they didn’t. They still aim at teenagers and the only reason the minimum age is on any of their boxes is because the tiny parts make them unsuitable to smaller children. They have done nothing to help parents identify their product as possibly harmful in content to parents.

Instead we get empty statements about how horrible people aren’t part of their community.

I’d also argue that the kind of parents that need this kind of warning labels on products are not the ones we have to worry about. They already know what little Jimmy is playing and if any subjects are in need of an explanation.

The parents that don’t give a fck if little Jimmy paints Nazi symbols and actually agrees with that kind of morality are the actual danger here … and you never reach them with bland statements such as this.