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Dashofpepper wrote:

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.

-----------------------
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.

I just wanted to say this:


The Las Vegas GT is presumably going to be run like all previous Games Workshop GTs before it, having an overall champion that is determined by a combined score of battle, sportsmanship, painting, etc, so I don't think it is inappropriate at all to have qualifying events use a similar standard.

The other thing that I would like to say is that it seems to me like many people are considering tickets to the Vegas GT like some kind of fantastic awards that needs to be highly regulated to ensure fairness. The fact is, these are just an invitation to play in another tournament that you have to pay to travel to and attend. The truth is, GW could have easily set a 'standardized' set of rules/missions for tournaments that wished to provide golden tickets as a prize, but they have chosen not to.

It could simply be laziness that motivated this choice or it could be the fact that they recognize that having a nice wide variety in the types of tournaments that players have a choice to attend (or not) is something that is *good* for the hobby rather than something that is bad.

Every tournament organizer is allowed to run the tournament the way they want to and you as the player have to decide if you like their tournament rules enough to plunk your hard-earned money down to play in it. If your *only* goal in a tournament is to win it and get the Vegas ticket I can understand why you'd be frustrated by a tournament that has substantial scoring in it that you can't directly control, but this is the nature of the tournament system that Games Workshop has allowed to exist this year, so holding it against tournament organizers is frankly just silly.

Don't play in the tournaments that you don't like the rules for and play in the tournaments that you do...any other alternative is just going to make you angry.


And back on point with the so-cal slaughter: Blackmoor and Janthkin have been badgering me to go because, lord knows, I do need more 40K games played outside of Adepticon once a year. But 2,000 points? I really dislike larger point games in tournaments. I know you have healthy 2 1/2 hour rounds, but still...I just don't know if I can bring myself to do it!

Hulksmash wrote:Didn't mean it like you were a follower. More that more of the circuit is moving in that direction MVB. I'm glad the practice is spreading either thru independent decision, feedback, or seeing how other people are doing it.

No worries - there wasn't any bristle in my post, just idle commentary.

yakface wrote:And back on point with the so-cal slaughter: Blackmoor and Janthkin have been badgering me to go because, lord knows, I do need more 40K games played outside of Adepticon once a year. But 2,000 points? I really dislike larger point games in tournaments. I know you have healthy 2 1/2 hour rounds, but still...I just don't know if I can bring myself to do it!

You can do it! We have FAITH!

Just bring the Tau; they look good, and they play fast.

You've done it before Yakface. Come one out and get in a good weekend of gaming. It's not like it's to far from where you live

Yakface is afraid of my pink orks. That's all.

Dashofpepper wrote:Yakface is afraid of my pink orks. That's all.

everyone should be afraid of pink orks

Hulksmash isn't afraid of the pink orks.

I try educating him, and he beats on them. :(

But everyone else...fear the pink!!

Wait Dash, are you bringing the orks now? I thought you were bringing the DE?

(Still trying to figure out a way to get his DE down to Santa Monica without having to re glue 7 raiders and 3 ravagers)

Bahkara wrote:

Dashofpepper wrote:Yakface is afraid of my pink orks. That's all.

everyone should be afraid of pink orks

So, you are going to finally make an appearance, or did Chris Hansen finally catch you?

Bahkara wrote:

Dashofpepper wrote:Yakface is afraid of my pink orks. That's all.

everyone should be afraid of pink orks

Pink orks will destroy you all

Blackmoor wrote:

Bahkara wrote:

Dashofpepper wrote:Yakface is afraid of my pink orks. That's all.

everyone should be afraid of pink orks

So, you are going to finally make an appearance, or did Chris Hansen finally catch you?

lol, i need an army first. Right now i'm more interested in historicals (napoleonics). If i make a comeback it will most likely be with CSM

asugradinwa wrote:Wait Dash, are you bringing the orks now? I thought you were bringing the DE?

(Still trying to figure out a way to get his DE down to Santa Monica without having to re glue 7 raiders and 3 ravagers)

I'll have raiders and ravagers you can borrow if you'll make some assurances. =p

And I thought I just waxed long and hard about why I'm not bringing DE.

1. DE cannot answer Mechanized IG.

2. There are many mechanized IG players (very good ones I'm told) around the L.A area.

3. The missions for this GT are skewed to support and reward mechanized IG players.

4. The unbalanced missions will make more players take mechanized IG to exploit the missions to their benefit.

If I thought that one in three players wasn't going to play mechanized IG, or that I wouldn't face them 2 or 3 games out of 5, I'd take my Dark Eldar. As it is, there is no way in HELL I'm going to to beat my head against a wall skewed against my success against the army mine is least capable of fighting.

So....the Pink Waaaugh! is flying to California. I think its wrong to reward people for taking MSUs and maximized transport lists by making the destruction of those vehicles not cost them killpoints. Those kind of lists don't need encouragement because they are extremely powerful as it is, and having an entire GT focused on rewarding that.....*shrugs helplessly*

Like I said; I booked my flight from NC to CA and the hotel before the scenarios came out; before I head to Bolter Beach or Mechanicon or any other GT, I'll make sure to research the event and bounce them off of other people. I really wanted to take my DE to LA for their first GT experience - they're good against most armies if I general well, but simply can't answer fully meched up IG in a fair fight, and the scenarios are unbalanced enough to make sure it isn't even a fair fight.

Yes, I'm bitter. ><

So....

WAAAAUGH!

I doubt there are going be 33% Mech IG armies there. And I seriously doubt you'll see them 3/5 games. But you bring the list you feel you'll do best with. Personally I don't think the missions are as skewed as you do but everyone can read something different

I have mech guard that I'm not gonna take because they aren't as balanced. I also considered my orks but I don't have the time to repaint them to the standard I'd like to take to a GT so they're out too

Could you be more clear on how the missions are skewed to benefit mech IG? Not saying you're wrong, just saying I don't get it.

Misson 2,3, and 5 have objectives related to kill points.

Mission 2 - reverse kill points, where keeping units alive is what matters. Dedicated transports don't count for this (so they all count as dead from the start basically). This seems like a minus for IG, though you will still want to kill the transports to get to the stuff inside.

Mission 4 - reduce units to half strength, HQ and dedicated transports excluded. This definitely favors a lot of hiding in transports, but I'm not sure how that is different for ravager/raider DE.

Mission 5 - slaughter style kill points. Since pretty much every dedicated transport is well south of 100 points, this seems like a negative for mech guard and SW, but probably in the end it is a wash for most armies.

lambadomy wrote:
Mission 4 - reduce units to half strength, HQ and dedicated transports excluded. This definitely favors a lot of hiding in transports, but I'm not sure how that is different for ravager/raider DE.

Because Chimeras kill Raiders at about a 3.16:1 ratio?

Sure, but that is just an argument against playing DE because they struggle against IG, not because of the mission. You have the exact same problem with or without those mission rules.

I completely agree that if you expect a lot of Mech IG that DE are probably not the best idea. I just am not sure the missions favor Mech IG in some unfair way.

I'm really just looking for more information since it will help me figure out my own army choice. Not a big deal really.

lambadomy wrote:Sure, but that is just an argument against playing DE because they struggle against IG, not because of the mission. You have the exact same problem with or without those mission rules.

I completely agree that if you expect a lot of Mech IG that DE are probably not the best idea. I just am not sure the missions favor Mech IG in some unfair way.

I'm really just looking for more information since it will help me figure out my own army choice. Not a big deal really.

The simplest answer is that the missions are designed to be EXTREMELY rewarding to heavily mechanized lists. IG can exploit that the most....meaning that mech IG are best positioned to win the GT based on the missions. All those transports don't count as killpoints, and to get killpoints, you have to kill the transports to get the stuff inside, which have no reason to ever come out.

Thus DE are out. DE can't answer mech IG anyway....and every player who can beg, borrow, or steal the models to bring a mech IG army should, because they've got an unfair advantage in this GT.

Oh hai. I have 24 units on the board. But 13 of them aren't killpoints. And you can't get to the other 11 killpoints without killing those 13 killpoints, ha.

Game1: Just fine. Strange deployment, but cool mission.

Game2: Obscene. Whoever has the most killpoints alive wins, and dedicated transports don't count. But....who else but mech IG with AV12 and dangerous guns with enough hatch space to let all the meltas and everything else inside shoot out? So you have to break through all that AV12 that benefits you not at all to get to the stuff inside to kill. So you can't ignore the transports, and killing them counts for nothing. Every mech IG player in the tournament basically should be getting almost an auto-pass here.

Game3: Broken, but enough whining has resulted in an apparent change that will go into effect in the next week. Two objectives per player, with the primary being to destroy your enemy objectives. This mission is/was set up so that you place objectives out in the middle before deploying, and having an infantry model touching one destroys it, meaning that scout vendettas carrying units can flat out scout move onto an objective, deploy, and win the primary objectives on turn1, and Emperor's Tarot makes it more than likely. If the same whining will fix mission 2, I'll keep at it...mechanized armies are powerful; some extremely powerful...the only thing even attempting to keep MSU and vehicle spam in check is them counting as killpoints, which has conveniently been removed.

Game4: Obscene. Whoever reduces the most units to half strength or immobilizes the most vehicles wins. Dedicated transports don't count again. So back to mech IG - immobilizing all those dedicated transports counts for bunk. But you have to deal with them to get to the MSUs inside. No other army (although SW mech/razorback spam comes close) can abuse this as much. All the armies that don't have 8-15 dedicated transports that also pack SERIOUS FIREPOWER are disadvantaged for a third game. And Mech IG can exploit it the best.

Game5: Just fine. Slaughter style killpoints, but not unbalanced or not including half of peoples' armies.

So 2/5 games are good, one of the remaining three is in the middle of getting fixed (I won't gripe about Emperor's Tarot + scouting vendettas here)....

Leaving us a distinct 2/5 games absolutely, atrociously skewed in favor of one army (maybe two).

If I don't play Mech IG (or mech space wolves) during game 2 or game 4, I'll have no gripe, but I'll feel bad for anyone who has to. If missions are going to get broken so badly to help one army, how about helping out assault based armies and making one game that's completely nightfight? One DoW mission with a modified deployment to put everything on the board....that's cool. But then in game5, DoW starts on turn5...which helps no one, and doesn't even really gimp mechdar, who are busy moving flat out onto objectives and can't shoot anyway.

Honestly, this mission BENEFITS mechdar - the turn they're going to pull their cheese, you have to nightfight against them.

Why not just put in the rules packet, "Armies that are not fully painted, fully based, and fully mechanized not allowed. Mechanized IG get +10 points towards tournament point totals.

*bitter*

Yes, I'm bitter. I'm still going, I'm still traveling 2500 miles to get there, I'm still going to have a blast - I'm going to be drunk, and I probably won't remember any of it, hopefully I'll remember to take pictures. I just think that there *is* an unfair skew towards one type of army building, which one particular codex does better than all others. I don't like unfairness or imbalance regardless of who it benefits, but when it specifically hurts me I like it even less.

You do manage to leave out the fact that Game 1 and 3 are going to be very hard to a Mech IG to pull a high scoring win if they can pull one at all. You also leave out that mission 5 hurts MSU/Mech IG almost as much as you claim that 2 and 4 do.

Don't forget that 5th edition is the mech edition. All armies that can mech up probably should. And I'd like to point out that a bunch of bs3 st6 poop ap shots aren't really that scary to most armies (read anyone except dark eldar). Each of those serious firepower users are going to kill 1 MEQ or 2-3 horde models (Tyrannids/Orks) if they are armed with heavy bolters, stubbers and multilasers. Vendettas are scarier but also almost 3x as much as a chimera and would count both the missions you mentioned. Do Dark Eldar suffer in this edition? Yes, because people take a lot of vehicles and they are harder to destroy and cheaper than any other edition. This is just something they have to deal with until a new codex is released and they up frontal armor away from paper airplane status.

Personally I think you put to much stock in certain people you play on vassal. Vassal has issues with LOS which is what is used to mitigate parking lot armies. There will be a fair amount of LOS blocking terrain (4 good sized pieces) on top of the standard forests/walls/fences style terrain.

I can tell you that looking at these missions I wouldn't want to play mech guard personally. I don't believe for a minute that they can clear off an objective in the enemy deployment zone to destroy it (this mission by the way would be skewed toward assault armies like you asked for). Same with mission 1 which has while a little easier for guard still hurts because of DoW which really hurts guards heavy firepower.

Basically build an army you think can do it all, play to your strengths, and don't sweat so much what other people will bring. Can your army sweep another army off objectives? Can you crack armor? Does your army have less than 24 Slaughter KP's? If the answer is yes to all of these then you'll do just fine overall.

Oh and on a side note because I find it funny to give a heads up. I'd be more worried about being able to kill 24 Bloodcrushers Cause if your winning all of your games you might get to see this list.

Hulksmash wrote:Dash, you're a whiny turd.

Well, sometimes you just need to whine.

And if there are two missions that negatively impact parking lots, there's two missions that positively impact them....I just want balance damnit!

Although if there's a good bit of LOS blocking terrain, that helps balance it out, but if the IG can't see my DE, my DE can't see them either....and I think mission 1 can be mitigated by IG by a couple of outflanking vendettas.

You do manage to leave out the fact that Game 1 and 3 are going to be very hard to a Mech IG to pull a high scoring win if they can pull one at all. You also leave out that mission 5 hurts MSU/Mech IG almost as much as you claim that 2 and 4 do.

What are you talking about? Mission 3 is possibly the easiest mission for mech IG to dominate because if they get first turn they can alpha strike on to both enemy objectives and blow them with satchel charges using Vendettas. This immediately scores 14 out of 20 possible points for the scenario and denies their opponent 6 points.

Even if this was the case it still doesn't alleviate the problem. If the scenarios are so lopsided then, as Dash pointed out, winning can be largely due to the luck of the draw with respect to pairings. Poorly designed missions with clear favoritism towards one type of build or the other just make things more rocks-paper-scissors and less a battle of strategy or tactics.

@Danny

You must have missed the part where that mission is changing to put placing the objectives after deployment zones are chosen which means they won't be able to alpha strike them.

And I hate to break it to you Danny but even the scenarios out of the book are lopsided for certain armies playing each other. With the multitude of codexes with the multitudes of builds your never going to see truly balanced missions for everyone. The only way to do what you seem to want Danny would be for everyone to play a single army list. Then it's mostly tactics and strategy with no impact from luck of the draw.

@Dash

Your not a whiney turd. I just like to point out the sky isn't falling Your just as entitled to your opinion on how the scenarios might effect one of your armies as I am to mine. I just wanted to show you how I saw it.

Where is it confirmed that this change is being made? The website affiliated with the tournament still features the original mission. The change would definitely be for the better, but I still don't see how this mission is impossible or even hard for mech IG (or mech anything) to win.

And I hate to break it to you, Hulk, but most players routinely play missions from the rulebook and build their armies based on these missions. Killpoints are expected and accounted for as are objective missions. The metagame and arguably even the codex design revolves around these core mission types and associated rules (such as the method in which scoring units capture objectives).

I understand luck is part of the game so please don't purposely misrepresent my argument and pretend I want everyone to play the same army. Rhetorical tactics like this are beneath you. I simply think luck should be minimized wherever possible. This tournament does the opposite.

It's been confirmed by Phazael several pages back when he also said that the final version should be up this week.

I was actually pointing out Danny that even the core missions are skewed individually toward certain lists builds. I don't doubt that all codexes are built around those missions and concepts found in the rulebook but my point was still that certain missions favor certain builds.

So from that above it's not to hard to move to the conclusion that it's still going to be a matter of luck of the draw in a tournament. If your running mech guard and run into that guy that brings 8 KP's then luck and pairings just hosed you. If your playing Seize Ground against Guard with that low KP army you've just got hosed based on pairing. That was my point. You have to look at the tournament missions as a whole.

I wasn't misinterpreting your arguement Danny. I was pointing out that to get the results and balance you seem to want that this is the direction you would have to go. It's a logical progression from your arguement.

Actually I play mech IG and kill points missions are usually easy wins regardless of match-up for a variety of reasons, but that's not really the point.

I was pointing out that to get the results and balance you seem to want that this is the direction you would have to go. It's a logical progression from your arguement.

Only if you make the (incorrect) assumption that I believe luck has no place in the game of Warhammer or in competition in general, hence why we have that old familiar saying about making assumptions.

My point is that luck should be minimized by either using rulebook scenarios (with the accepted baseline level of luck built in) or constructing new analogous scenarios that don't obviously favor one build or another. Instead, the TO chose to create some wacky missions that have the potential to reduce many games to rocks-paper-scissors. This is a bad thing from a competitive perspective. Poor scenario design like this is a major source of ire from those of us who enjoy competitive gaming.

Hulksmash wrote:
Oh and on a side note because I find it funny to give a heads up. I'd be more worried about being able to kill 24 Bloodcrushers Cause if your winning all of your games you might get to see this list.

This is why I hate theme/comp in tournaments. You end up making a weak, watered down version of your army to be fluffy, and then you go up against Touraj's Bloodcrusher army of death, or anyone else that is ignoring the comp score to crush everyone.

He ignores comp but his army is truly fluffy

Some armies fluff is powerful while others is not. Comp is 30 points out off 200. Comp is a 6 point per game checklist that combined with a 6 point sports checklist all but 1 person last year scored a 11/12 every game. Don't worry about the comp so much. Bring what you want to play and normally you'll do alright.

Scenarios have been updated. Link should be the same on the first page. Main changes are:

-Deploy objectives after deployment zones are determined on mission 3

-Dedicated transports now count toward number of immobolized/under 1/2 strength units.

So basically there is an objective mission. Modified Capture and Control. Reverse KP's. KP's. and Modified KP's similar to VP's combined with table quarter holding.

Hulksmash wrote:Scenarios have been updated. Link should be the same on the first page. Main changes are:

-Deploy objectives after deployment zones are determined on mission 3

-Dedicated transports now count toward number of immobolized/under 1/2 strength units.

So basically there is an objective mission. Modified Capture and Control. Reverse KP's. KP's. and Modified KP's similar to VP's combined with table quarter holding.

Woot. 2/3 missions fixed.

Now just to get mission two fixed, where a mechanized guard list can lose 50%+ of the units ad points in their list without it impacting their killpoints in any way. If you're going to do this, I REALLY think that the dedicated transport and the unit inside should count as a full killpoint, such that if the dedicated transport is killed, the unit only counts for 0.5 killpoints left on the table.

It is simply unfair to let one or two armies from the most powerful codexes whose most powerful builds fit precisely into exploitation of this mission to be able to do this.

So I think my wife points expired with Adepticon and I don't think I'm gonna make it down to Slaughter in Space.

You will have to find another person to score max battle points from.

Am I missing something on mission 2?

If they changed mission 2 so that dedicated transports counted, that would only help guard.

The way I read it, right now, if a mech guard vets list had, say, 15 kill points and 6 of those are dedicated transports, the max the guard player could score would be 9 (9 kill points alive). They just count as "dead" automatically. Yes, you'd not get a lot for killing the transports, but only because you already got those points from the start.

Of course, this mission is still designed to *help* high kill point armies, and screw low kill point armies, which I don't really get - isn't the point of kill points to try to prevent MSU and mech spam, or at least make it a disadvantage sometimes? I can't wait to play a foot guard or marine army and watch them split up all their squads just to get extra kill points to score with.