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I normally don't agree with skyth's assertion that these types of comp scores are exclusionary, this checklist would be the closest to doing so that I've seen.

Not to say that it is intentional, but 5 of the 6 check boxes are vague enough as to be interpreted completely differently by two different players, and very easily interpreted advantageously by any player. If the true expectation is for everyone to get a 11 or 12 on total comp and sportsmanship, the entire thing should just be a sportsmanship [-1, 0, 1]? checklist, with perhaps worse penalties for getting 3+ -1's. Otherwise this is either chipmunk central or hand out 6's because you don't care.

#1) My opponent’s army was accurately represented or clearly explained in advance if not to WYSIWYG standards.
- Fine, reasonably straightforward

#2) My opponents list was not designed to abuse rule loopholes.
- What is a rules loophole? A rule you don't like, or an entire army you don't like!

#3) My army was based on a theme and stayed within its fluff
- What is theme and fluff? I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT!

#4) My opponent’s army made reasonable use of troop choices
- What is reasonable? Exactly how many I have, of the quality that I have! Only two sucky troops choices in a codex full of sucky troops in a game that requires you to have troops to win?! You should be penalized further! 6 good troops?! How dare you try to win objectives!

#5) My opponent’s army did not unreasonably overwhelm the hand-to-hand or shooting phase.
- I play marines, they are nice and balanced. You don't, -1

#6) My opponent’s army was built for an enjoyable game, not win at all cost and sacrificed power for fun.
- I didn't really enjoy being tabled by you on turn 3 with my absolutely terrible army and decisions. -1. Or, I didn't really enjoy tabling you on turn 3, -1. Or, last i checked, taking terrible units doesn't actually make the game fun.

Maybe I'm just bitter because this checklist and the slaughter style killpoints are keeping me from bringing a barely-competitive tau farsight army and forcing me to try to finish painting chaos in the next week+. But I really think this checklist could use a lot of tightening.

@Lambadomy

11/12 was just the results of last year. I agree that the list could use some tightening or even a total removal but it's still their gig. I was merely using the 11/12 example to show people that it is still BP's that are determining the winners of the event.

That said your Farsight army would still be buildable. There is a single mission that uses slaughter-style KP's. It will actually help you to since so many of the KP's will be tied up in that squad it will force people to shoot at it even more since if they don't they are effectively denied around 1/3 of the possible KP's.

**edited based on comment below**

For reference, the system was designed to universally apply to both our fantasy and 40k events, hence some of the somewhat vague language. In practice, most people generally got 10-12 points from softs per game, which is really what we wanted and expected. It spreads things out a little and keeps certain decisions out of the judges hands, as it pertains to rankings.

As for the Judge comp, its really simple. The three comp judges (none of whom are participating) sit down and go over all of the lists. Each judge rates the list on a 0-5 scale, which is then totalled. The first two rounds are paired so that people play something that comped as near to them as possible. The judge scores are then tossed and never used for anything else. After round two, all pairings are done by total Battle Points.

For the most part, we have been pretty good about getting things right, though it has not been perfect. Stealth cheese does get addressed, but the most important criteria we have in rating something is how fun and interractive it is to play. If the army is designed to frustrate, it is going to run a little lower even if it is otherwise weak, for example. Again it is not a perfect system, but it gives the fluff bunnies a couple reasonable games on the weekend and it keeps the power armies from getting a free pass in the first round.

As for votes, we use those strictly to break ties, to prevent team voting, where a group will all vote only for their pals to pump their scores relative to everyone else. It does not stop it completely, but it does mitigate the abuse.

For the record, we only investigate soft scoring when it appears that obvious lowballing took place. If I recall, its happened twice in the five GTs we have had and both times at the Fantasy events. I guess we could revisit the option of clarifying the language on some of the checklists, to better accomadate the 40k crowd.

Another thing people are ignoring is that the Comp and Sports scores are there so that we can give Best Sportsmanship trophies, which I personally feel to be very important. Skyth's point about them being exclusionary is valid to a degree, but it will never hamper someone from taking Best General (along with one of our finals invites), which we treat as the second most important award.

So, I guess what I am trying to say here is, yes we have soft scores, but our emphasis is in fact on Battle Points. Every other indi GT is awarding their invites purely on overalls. And Battle Points have traditionally had the most direct impact on overall scores in our events. And finally, you need the fluffbunnies as much as the power gamers to sell the event out.

I didn't see anything in the rules packet about requiring fully painted armies, is there a requirement? Most the army I'm thinking about bringing is fully painted but I have a couple units not quite finished yet (they got put on the back-burner for the units I needed at Adepticon...).

Ozymandias wrote:I didn't see anything in the rules packet about requiring fully painted armies, is there a requirement? Most the army I'm thinking about bringing is fully painted but I have a couple units not quite finished yet (they got put on the back-burner for the units I needed at Adepticon...).

You've got a solid 3 weeks after Adepticon to get it done! Man up! In the absence of the paint scoring sheet, it's hard to know how much a not-completely-painted army will hurt you.

(Actually, I only recently noticed that I'll need another 150 pts for the Slaughter In Space; fortunately, it shouldn't be hard spending those.)

Stupid house and wedding are sucking up my available funds so no Slaughter for me this time.

Besides, my Salamanders need to be repainted and my dark Eldar really don't travel well.

It'll be a fun event though I'm sure!

Yeah, I wouldn't expect it to happen much - just like most people aren't bad sports, most people aren't chipmunking either. That is typically a large part of the no-comp/no-sports crowds argument, that people act nice enough regardless. Part of acting nice is not chipmunking.

I find myself giving my opponents max comp/sports scores in almost every game I play, almost compulsively. Not because I am lazy or because I'm trying to break the system, but because even if it wasn't the best game ever I feel like a jerk stealing points from someone. Based on the 10-12 scores everyone is getting, and from my experience at other events, etc I think this feeling combined with "I don't care, here's your 10" gives most people high scores, regardless of what the checklist is actually going for.

I think that only using battle points for giving out your invites is an good compromise, it will be interesting to see how it works out.

Anyway, I understand what you're going for and in theory have no problem with it. I just feel a couple of the checklist items are too vague or don't really apply in 40k anymore, like the fluff one - if you started 40k in 4ed you'd probably fail fluff with most armies against people playing since 2nd or 3rd who care about such things.

Janthkin wrote:

Ozymandias wrote:I didn't see anything in the rules packet about requiring fully painted armies, is there a requirement? Most the army I'm thinking about bringing is fully painted but I have a couple units not quite finished yet (they got put on the back-burner for the units I needed at Adepticon...).

You've got a solid 3 weeks after Adepticon to get it done! Man up! In the absence of the paint scoring sheet, it's hard to know how much a not-completely-painted army will hurt you.

(Actually, I only recently noticed that I'll need another 150 pts for the Slaughter In Space; fortunately, it shouldn't be hard spending those.)

I'm sure my wife will love me coming back from being gone for several days of gaming and being busy every night again to paint up an army for another tournament that will take me away for a weekend...

But seriously I will do my best to have a fully painted, 3-color force, but I'm a terribly slow painter and have a feeling I'll be a little burned out after Adepticon.

@hulksmash:

You're right, for some reason I thought two missions used the slaughter style killpoints, but it is only one. Maybe it's time to dust off Farsight and get some practice games in (mostly practice moving a 20+ model JSJ unit, ugh)

and yeah, I have no problem with the intention and I understand it's their gig.

Ozymandias wrote:

Janthkin wrote:You've got a solid 3 weeks after Adepticon to get it done! Man up! In the absence of the paint scoring sheet, it's hard to know how much a not-completely-painted army will hurt you.

(Actually, I only recently noticed that I'll need another 150 pts for the Slaughter In Space; fortunately, it shouldn't be hard spending those.)

I'm sure my wife will love me coming back from being gone for several days of gaming and being busy every night again to paint up an army for another tournament that will take me away for a weekend...

But seriously I will do my best to have a fully painted, 3-color force, but I'm a terribly slow painter and have a feeling I'll be a little burned out after Adepticon.

And this is why I'll only be painting 1 more model before SiS (and why I'm using the same army for both). My wife points are pretty much gone already, just from the neglect over the past few weeks.

Hey SCGWL folks - how about you swap the Slaughter & the Slaughter in Space next year? Pretty please? It'd be a lot easier to handle both, if they were more widely separated in time.

Mannahnin wrote:Sorry Kevin, I assumed too much that you’d know what I meant by social contract. I mean that when you agree to play in a tournament, you agree to play by the rules. No? If the rules include sportsmanship scoring by the players, the player’s obligation is to follow the instructions to the best of their ability.

Not filling out the card would be not playing by the rules.

If a player disregards the tournament's scoring instructions (like say, putting himself down for bonus battle points he did not earn), he is violating the rules of the event, undermining the validity of the scoring, and breaking the implicit social agreement between himself, the organizers, and the other players, to all play honestly by the same rules, which the organizer has established.

Agreed. This is completely different than maxing out a subjective scoring system. One is cheating. One is maxing out a subjective scoring system.

If the criteria are genuinely so badly-explained or ambiguous that your honest effort to use them results in a surprising / unpleasant result for the organizer, that’s clearly a problem with his system / explanations. If, on the other hand, you don’t invest the honest effort to abide by the rules, that’s your responsibility.

Sure. I challenge them to prove that I didn't make an honest effort. They can't.

I know that some folks use giving all max scores as effectively a “protest vote”, but I disagree that it’s a reasonable or appropriate response. It’s disrespectful to the organizer, and effectively challenges him to throw you out of the event for breaking the rules. The more ethical course of action is just not to participate, or to follow the rules as best you can and then give reasoned, thoughtful criticism.

Making their system look stupid in person is far more effective than braying to deaf ears on a message board.

Kevin Nash wrote:

Mannahnin wrote:Sorry Kevin, I assumed too much that you’d know what I meant by social contract. I mean that when you agree to play in a tournament, you agree to play by the rules. No? If the rules include sportsmanship scoring by the players, the player’s obligation is to follow the instructions to the best of their ability.

Not filling out the card would be not playing by the rules.

More precisely, not filling out the card as instructed by the organizers is not following the rules.

Kevin Nash wrote:

Mannahnin wrote:If a player disregards the tournament's scoring instructions (like say, putting himself down for bonus battle points he did not earn), he is violating the rules of the even....

Agreed. This is completely different than maxing out a subjective scoring system. One is cheating. One is maxing out a subjective scoring system.

How is it different at all? Just because something is subjective doesn’t mean it’s impossible to evaluate. If the text next to 10 on Sports is “this was the most fun game I ever played”, you can certainly make an honest evaluation of whether it was or not. Most of the time that’s an easy “no”. I completely agree that if the categories are unclear, no one can fault you for scoring imprecisely. But often times they use specific examples which make it pretty easy to do.

Kevin Nash wrote:

Mannahnin wrote: If the criteria are genuinely so badly-explained or ambiguous that your honest effort to use them results in a surprising / unpleasant result for the organizer, that’s clearly a problem with his system / explanations. If, on the other hand, you don’t invest the honest effort to abide by the rules, that’s your responsibility.

Sure. I challenge them to prove that I didn't make an honest effort. They can't.

Do you make them prove you didn’t use weighted dice, or expect them to be on the lookout to make sure you don’t sneak extra models onto the table which aren’t on your army list? Your responsibility is to be honest. The fact that you dislike the scoring system isn’t a good excuse to break the rules, or treat the organizers with contempt.

Kevin Nash wrote:

Mannahnin wrote: The more ethical course of action is just not to participate, or to follow the rules as best you can and then give reasoned, thoughtful criticism.

Making their system look stupid in person is far more effective than braying to deaf ears on a message board.

No, I mean TALK to them like one respectful adult to another, and give them detailed, written feedback. It’s usually easiest to do via email after the event. Expressing your disagreement by attempting to make their system “look stupid” is passive-aggressive, petty, and kind of cowardly, IMO.

Painting is not mandatory, though we do prefer painted armies. Having a low painting score will hurt you on the Overall and Best Painted, but not on Best General or Sportsmanship awards.

Ok, thanks. I don't think I need to worry too much about Best Painted or Best Overall (or Best General for that matter...).

I was just speaking generally about the high percentage of soft score points. Having the best general award unaffected by soft scores mitigates this to an extent. There are events that combine battle and comp to determine best general. Those are definitely exclusionary.

I will say that having a checklist is better than a 1-10 scale to make things less exclusionary.

So, I guess what I am trying to say here is, yes we have soft scores, but our emphasis is in fact on Battle Points. Every other indi GT is awarding their invites purely on overalls. And Battle Points have traditionally had the most direct impact on overall scores in our events. And finally, you need the fluffbunnies as much as the power gamers to sell the event out.

Actually, you're not the only tournament awarding a ticket to the Best General winner. Both Bolter Reach and The NOVA Open are both doing this as well.

As for your final comment, why do you assume all gamers are either "fluffbunnies" or "power gamers"? This is a bizarre mischaracterization of the Warhammer community. Not everyone interested in painting or theme is a "fluffbunny" and not everyone who enjoys competitive play is a "power gamer." And do you have any evidence to support the assertion that you need to run a hobby event the way you do in order to sell the event out? We have tournaments in this area with more than 40 sign-ups every other month (and that's just from one of the stores!) that have a complete separation of the painting and tournament parts of the event. Hell, I couldn't even play in the last one because it filled up a month in advance and it was competing with the SVDM (held on the same weekend). No sportsmanship or comp scoring is needed to ensure things stay civil and fun because the tournament organizers are on top of things (as they should be). Perhaps if you stopped trying so hard to force people to bring "fun" armies you'd realize that spots will still be filled and that people are capable of having fun all by themselves.

To be fair Danny the Slaughter was the first tournament to announce that they were going to be giving one ticket away to the Best General. Bolter Beach originally balked at the idea when I mentioned it in their thread and then decided to do it after another organizer of the event mentioned it to GBF. And I'm glad the NOVA Open is following in this direction.

As for the final comment I think your oversimplifying it. He's not saying everyone is one or the other. But to truly sell an event you need space for even the extremes of the hobby.

When your renting out a large convention center and fronting a lot of money you want to try and get it back as best you can. Your asking people to gamble with a good amount of their money. There is a huge difference between a $10 entry fee and $65. Dedicating 2 days isn't always possible either. Personally I think that there is a smaller pool available locally that would be up for a GT than an RTT.

I don't know for sure who was the 1st person to suggest giving one ticket to Vegas for the best general award. Hulksmash if you said you mentioned it I won't try to discredit your statement but honestly the first person I remember suggesting it is my partner Yuri Devilbiss for Bolter Beach. It's not a big deal to me and I'm not going to Wade through several pages of the BB thread to find out. I do think Yuri deserves credit for the idea though as I don't remember seeing this mentioned prior in any other GT announcement threads. We decided to go this route after experiencing the vocal outcry against using comp and it seemed to staunch the blood. You still have to run an excellent event at the end of the day and to me that makes our main goal at BB keeping the BS factor down to the zero level. I think we can acheive that goal and I appreciate everyone who provided their honest opinion. You can't do these things in a vacuum, or you are just looking for some trouble.

G

Mannahnin wrote:

Kevin Nash wrote:

Mannahnin wrote:Sorry Kevin, I assumed too much that you’d know what I meant by social contract. I mean that when you agree to play in a tournament, you agree to play by the rules. No? If the rules include sportsmanship scoring by the players, the player’s obligation is to follow the instructions to the best of their ability.

Not filling out the card would be not playing by the rules.

More precisely, not filling out the card as instructed by the organizers is not following the rules.

Kevin Nash wrote:

Mannahnin wrote:If a player disregards the tournament's scoring instructions (like say, putting himself down for bonus battle points he did not earn), he is violating the rules of the even....

Agreed. This is completely different than maxing out a subjective scoring system. One is cheating. One is maxing out a subjective scoring system.

How is it different at all? Just because something is subjective doesn’t mean it’s impossible to evaluate. If the text next to 10 on Sports is “this was the most fun game I ever played”, you can certainly make an honest evaluation of whether it was or not. Most of the time that’s an easy “no”. I completely agree that if the categories are unclear, no one can fault you for scoring imprecisely. But often times they use specific examples which make it pretty easy to do.

Kevin Nash wrote:

Mannahnin wrote: If the criteria are genuinely so badly-explained or ambiguous that your honest effort to use them results in a surprising / unpleasant result for the organizer, that’s clearly a problem with his system / explanations. If, on the other hand, you don’t invest the honest effort to abide by the rules, that’s your responsibility.

Sure. I challenge them to prove that I didn't make an honest effort. They can't.

Do you make them prove you didn’t use weighted dice, or expect them to be on the lookout to make sure you don’t sneak extra models onto the table which aren’t on your army list? Your responsibility is to be honest. The fact that you dislike the scoring system isn’t a good excuse to break the rules, or treat the organizers with contempt.

Kevin Nash wrote:

Mannahnin wrote: The more ethical course of action is just not to participate, or to follow the rules as best you can and then give reasoned, thoughtful criticism.

Making their system look stupid in person is far more effective than braying to deaf ears on a message board.

No, I mean TALK to them like one respectful adult to another, and give them detailed, written feedback. It’s usually easiest to do via email after the event. Expressing your disagreement by attempting to make their system “look stupid” is passive-aggressive, petty, and kind of cowardly, IMO.

Subjective usually means it is impossible to evaluate in critical and quantitative manner. If the organizer is asking for a number that defines my experience with another player, where the terms of evaluation are "best ever", "really good", etc then it becomes a reflexive call, based on your own experiences, not on the actual sportsmanship of the opponent or composition of the opponents army. In reality, I am a very positive person and every experience is of ultimate value and worth, every experience is the "best", and therefore becomes impossible to quantify my play experience on such terms. Better checklists have been created, but all have ultimately introduced subjective criteria. If this is a qualitative scoring system then 5 games, without a control, does not provide enough data to gather the appropriate amount of information to yield a valid result. Kevin Nash's experience, if anything, only exemplifies one of the many issues related to this scoring methodology. He did not break any social contract, since none was implicitly or explicitly give. He graded their sportsmanship and theme scores to the best of his ability, which is poor, but complete.

The worst people are the ones that pretend they are not "bad" and will game the system to advantage without leading on that they are gaming it. Allowing opponents to score only enables these sorts of people to have more impact on the scene than they would without. The true manipulator of the system is the one that gives you the greatest game of your life and then docs you on YOUR sportsmanship score. The greatest con-men are the ones that leave you thinking you had a great experience. Sportsmanship scoring benefits the truly malevolent much more than it scares them away and only gives the benevolent the illusion of a fair environment. (Sorry if this became a bit philosophical, but its important to understand in my opinion)

I know much of this is off topic, but it is important in any tournament discussion to bring up potential areas of corruption such that the environment can improve. This is an area of interest to me, since it is one of my plans, which I am working towards, to host tournaments of this scale. At this moment, my feelings would be to have a tournament without sportsmanship or composition scores. I might add a "Favorite Player" concept, but that would not be contributed towards the overall winner. There would be a painting competition, but again no contribute towards the game winner pool, and would have a detailed objective checklist for scoring.

Black Blow Fly wrote:I don't know for sure who was the 1st person to suggest giving one ticket to Vegas for the best general award. Hulksmash if you said you mentioned it I won't try to discredit your statement but honestly the first person I remember suggesting it is my partner Yuri Devilbiss for Bolter Beach. It's not a big deal to me and I'm not going to Wade through several pages of the BB thread to find out. I do think Yuri deserves credit for the idea though as I don't remember seeing this mentioned prior in any other GT announcement threads. We decided to go this route after experiencing the vocal outcry against using comp and it seemed to staunch the blood. You still have to run an excellent event at the end of the day and to me that makes our main goal at BB keeping the BS factor down to the zero level. I think we can acheive that goal and I appreciate everyone who provided their honest opinion. You can't do these things in a vacuum, or you are just looking for some trouble.

G

A conversation in a thread we had 4 days before you announced that you were giving a ticket away for best general. The post above mine states you think it's a bad idea to give a ticket to anyone except the top 2 overall. The actual conversation starts at the top of the page between us.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/280263.page#1351972

And here is where I posted their rules for their event that went up before your introduction of the event.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/60/279207.page#1358743

A backhanded "I don't believe you" is a still an "I don't believe you".

Though I agree that listening to the community is important for growing your event. I'm sure there will be a plethora of posts after the Slaughter in this thread too. And not all of them will be positive (though last year they were ). But either way it'll be a learning experience for the TO's who can adjust things for next year.

But to truly sell an event you need space for even the extremes of the hobby.

When your renting out a large convention center and fronting a lot of money you want to try and get it back as best you can. Your asking people to gamble with a good amount of their money. There is a huge difference between a $10 entry fee and $65. Dedicating 2 days isn't always possible either. Personally I think that there is a smaller pool available locally that would be up for a GT than an RTT.

I understand and even greatly appreciate the effort and degree of financial risk that tournament organizers put into these events. That being said, one can respect all aspects of the hobby without lumping them together in order to find some overall champion. By combining these totally separate parts the emphasis of the event shifts away from the tournament part and over to the other competitions (painting, sportsmanship, and theme). At that point it is inaccurate to call the event a tournament.

As others have suggested, the best way to pay respect to all forms of playing is to keep scoring for each category separate and not to have an overall winner at all. That way the event caters equally to all styles of play.

@ Hulksmash

So okay I waded through all the posts. You did indeed state on 02/23/10 that the socal event will award one golden ticket to the best general (ties broken on soft score) while I announced this for BB two days later. I also did not see anywhere specifically where I said the two best overall should both be awarded the pair of golden tickets. Feel free to quote me if I missed it. Anyways I was not aware of your 02/23 post but yeah you stated it first so kudos there. Yuri was the first person to approach me with this idea though and that's why i credited him here. Basically it's cool to know some people were thinking the same thing within a relatively short time frame of each other. Again my kudos.

G

I'll bite

Sorry for not being specific in my links. One linked to your Tournament discussion that you set up as a separate discussion to keep the comp talk out of your thread. But here it is:

2/21

Black Blow Fly wrote:If people are competing for a golden ticket to Vegas it's the responsibility of the TOs to fairly determine who are the top two players which boils down to best overall and 2nd best overall. It's also important to recognize there is the vocal minority that posts a lot on forums and blogs while there is also the silent majority. Dakka may at anytime have up to around 20,000 viewers but only a couple thousand at most are registered.

G

2/21

Black Blow Fly wrote:Hulksmash I think it's best to give the second ticket to the player with the second best overall score. As a TO that seems the most fair to me and maybe more importantly not controversial.

So far I have not seen much of a homogeneous consensus in regards to scoring other than most people appear to agree that the majority of the points should be drawn from battlepoints. I have also seen a good number of people say the rules for comp should be very clear. All in all I think this is a good discussion and hope that more people will join in with us here.

G

Don't get me wrong. I'm stoked you guys decided on this direction. I think it's better for the 40k circuit as a whole and it's something I think GW should mandate.

And Back on Topic:

@Danny

I agree that separating out the different aspects of the hobby would be a better thing. It's just not possible with the circuit that GW has. Even the UK GT has people in the final round who weren't the best generals of their event but qualified based on the hobby as a whole (mostly painting I believe).

* oops *

how could I have missed that??



Seriuosly though going back a second time I now see what I said appeared before your post which my browser opens when I clicked on your first link to the tournament discussion thread, only now after going back and scrolling up instead of down did I find the quoted entries. I certainly did post them and I apologize for my apparent state of muddling confusion.

G

I agree that separating out the different aspects of the hobby would be a better thing. It's just not possible with the circuit that GW has. Even the UK GT has people in the final round who weren't the best generals of their event but qualified based on the hobby as a whole (mostly painting I believe).

Why isn't it possible? We run events like this here all of the time and they are very popular. I didn't say that this separation was necessary to make sure the best generals of the event win, just that it is the best way to provide equal respect to all styles of play.

It isn't practical because people are all over the spectrum on the competitive vs fluff bunny issue. Further, sportsmanship is an entirely seperate issue and until some TO has the balls to toss someone for being a total ass, soft scores are the only thing keeping certain people in check. Therefore, any system employed has to do its best to accomadate both the extremely partisan competitive people (such as you Danny), the super fluff nazi softy people, and everything in between. You also have to make sure people are as civil to one another as possible or you end up with situations like that assclown eldar player up at the Conquest GT in Seattle. Again, I don't claim we are perfect, but at least every general style of play has some type of award achievable by that player, with only relavent scores applying to their respective catagory.

I don't know what you want out of a GT (I don't think you know yourself), but no one is going to run Hard Boyz 2.0, especially with all the horror stories comming out of the free to play GW version.

Phazael wrote:soft scores are the only thing keeping certain people in check

This is a "False Dilemma". People are trying to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist. I repeat, this only creates the "illusion" of safety.

Further, sportsmanship is an entirely seperate issue and until some TO has the balls to toss someone for being a total ass, soft scores are the only thing keeping certain people in check. Therefore, any system employed has to do its best to accomadate both the extremely partisan competitive people (such as you Danny), the super fluff nazi softy people, and everything in between. You also have to make sure people are as civil to one another as possible or you end up with situations like that assclown eldar player up at the Conquest GT in Seattle. Again, I don't claim we are perfect, but at least every general style of play has some type of award achievable by that player, with only relavent scores applying to their respective catagory.

This may come as a shock, but it is your job as a tournament organizer to have those balls and toss people out for behaving badly. Take from Mikhaila's example: he booted someone from an 'Ard Boyz round hosted at his store. Our local events (which are the same size as some of the indy GT's) prove that you don't need soft scores to keep "certain people in check." Competent TO's ensure that soft scores are unnecessary for people to have a good time.

I don't know what you want out of a GT (I don't think you know yourself), but no one is going to run Hard Boyz 2.0, especially with all the horror stories comming out of the free to play GW version.

Am I speaking Chinese or something? I made it perfectly clear what I want out of a tournament: separate but equal respect paid to every style of play. Painting scores, comp scores, sportsmanship scores, battle points scores--they're all welcome. Just don't have an overall winner, because as soon as you place one award above the rest you've catapulted one particular style of play (the well-rounded hobbyist, in this case) to a position above all others. This shifts the entire focus of the event and it is no longer accurate to refer to your event as a tournament.

Danny I would like to hear your opinion how should golden tickets be awarded. Should it go to which category? Also how should ties be decided for battle points?

G

Black Blow Fly wrote:Danny I would like to hear your opinion how should golden tickets be awarded. Should it go to which category? Also how should ties be decided for battle points?

G

I'd venture an answer here:

The two golden tickets should be to the two highest scoring players of course. We're talking about a tournament here; a competitive event where people go to fight each others' armies - a golden ticket to a bigger competition should go to the top two competition winners.

Sportsmanship, painting, favorite player - those are secondary categories.

Perhaps painting could have its own two golden tickets - and the two winners are allowed to attend a golden daemon competition. I don't think qualifying as "not a jerk" really needs any special advancement.

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In terms of tie-breakers - if a tournament scores battlepoints on a 20-30 point scale with bonus points and difficult enough objectives that actually accomplishing the whole thing (I look at Adepticon scenarios) is exquisitely difficult...there shouldn't be ties. And you can log victory points if need be just in case.