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I recently attended a regional GT tournament that left a bad taste in my mouth about how they scored paint. (I won’t disclose the name as I’m not trying to generate bad press. I had a blast!)

The event was scored as followed.
100 battle points
50 paint
50 sports

I like how the score was set up as I think first overall should be the best hobbyist/player/sportsman. Just for the hardcore player they have the Ard boyz and for the hardcore painters they have the golden daemon. The way paint was to be scored was as follows.

“The minimum standard for paint scoring is 3 colors and based. Primer does not count as a color.
Basing means some sort of texture (sand, etc.) painted any color, or flocking at a minimum.
You are not required to have your army painted in order to play, but if you choose to bring an unpainted
army your painting score will reflect that decision.”
“There will be no rubric for painting. Painting is one of my first and foremost loves of the game and breaking painting down into a checklist does not lend itself to a good judgement of quality painting.”
“You are not required to have a painted army or paint your army yourself. Be aware that both of these cases will take you out of the running for best painted obviously and will severly hamper your ability to win best overall. This will not affect you in any other way besides these two catagories.”

I was excited that paint was now worth a quarter of the competition as last year it was worth about 12% or so. After the results were posted people started getting upset. Because there was not a rubric a lot of people had complaints like “Johnny McJohnster got a 12/50 and I got a 9/50. I have a fully painted table top army and he only had half his stuff painted.” An organizer would give his reasons for scoring the way they did to the questioning party but having nothing solid to back up on. I think it’s important to realize that painting miniatures is an art in itself but the majority of tournament goers are gamers first and foremost. To make matters worse (INHO) the army that won the “best painted award” got a 40/50. A friend of mine recived only a 13/50 with his fully painted army. He is not the greatest painter in the world and he knows this but he worked for 3 months to get it painted to an acceptable standard of 4ish colors and washes and full basing and a display board. After the event he said that he wouldn’t have even bothered. I think this discourages people from painting their armies and for me that is something I don’t want to happen. I enjoy playing against a fully painted army even if its blue spray and a couple colors of dry brushed Smurfs.

The Biggest complaint from a participant in the event by far was a player was asked how he did some detail on a tank. The player responded I did not paint the tanks in my army but everything else is mine. He was given a zero in paint. His army was fully painted and looked pretty good. It would have been ok if everyone that had models unpainted or painted by someone else had been zeroed. But it explicitly said “You are not required to have a painted army or paint your army yourself. Be aware that both of these cases will take you out of the running for best painted obviously and will severely hamper your ability to win best overall. This will not affect you in any other way besides these two categories.” As far as I can tell he was the only one asked. Examples: a buddy of mine got an 8/50 with a half painted army, another borrowed half an army just to get a paint score and got a 19/50, a person had an army there that has won “best painted” before that is a commission army got a good score and none of these players were ever asked if they had painted their armies.

Now that hopefully you understand where I’m coming from how do you think paint should be judged at an Indy GT? I feel that a quarter of overall is good. If your army is fully WYSIWYG and painted (3 color min) and based you should automatically get half points. Work your way up from there on a check list. This way people will know what kind of score they’re getting before going into the tournament. After this check list more than likely a couple players will get full points and this is where it gets subjective. You pick your top 3 or have a couple people pick the top 3 out of all the fully marked armies. After you have your top three picks lined out, question all of them to make sure their eligible for “best painted” and after that everyone is happy and one of the people that deserved best painted still gets it. Leaving the minimum for a 3 color and based army still at 12.5% of the standings will get your “less inclined” to paint their armies as that can push them up in brackets.

My 2 cents! What’s yours?

Giving someone a 0 for not painting their army and taking them out of best overall seems kinda stupid to me.

Mainly because you can't really judge who painted their army and who didn't. For example, what if I didn't paint my army but I made sure to know how it was painted.

Now I can answer any questions about the painting and pretend I painted it.

Again, tbh I have the same feelings as you. Painting is so subjective. One person may love a paint job and someone else might hate it.

Your proposed system seems at least like a decent idea on how to score it.

(also paint scoring a game is stupid, some of us hate painting and its stupid to force us to do it to play in a tournament. Some of us don't have steady hands or 300 hours to waste painting an army to the highest possible level. Painting imo should always be a seperate competition, same with sportsmanship.)

Painting should be judged by a panel.

Did Clay do the judging at the Big Waaagh!?

If so, I would like to hear what his thoughts are.

But when you are judging an army it might not be as good as you think it is. Also there are other flaws and defects that you can see when close up that appear in what seems like a well painted army at arms length.

The fact that the highest painted army scored a 40 means that he was a tough judge, so although it seems bad when you get a 9 to 19, but you know that they others that have similar paint jobs are getting the same scores.

But it is hard to refute allegations of being incorrectly scored in painting without seeing the armies and having them all together. It is easy to say that I didn't deserve a score of X, when you really did.

I think having a painting score that influences the results of best over all is STUPID! This is coming from someone that has taken bast painted at a GT and won a few golden demons. Painting should be all or nothing IMO. 3 colors (primer not being one of them) based nicely (Just not painting the base green). If you want to break it down some more you can have: 0-not painted 7-painted to minimum 10-Painted with some shading and nice detail.

Having painting count in the overall, being worth 25% of the points and being judged by different people (unless there was just one person doing the judging) and on a sliding scale is dumb. It only encourages people to lie and get someone to paint an army for them if they want to try to win best over all at all. So to win a competition you must be; a great general/tactician, a great sport and be a master painters. That sounds like a tall order just to play a game and try to win.

If they want to have a separate point system 1-50 to judge the painting competition on and have an award for that, that is ok. By having it lumped into the overall score pisses off more people then it ever makes happy and keeps more people from even showing up to these events. At least that is what I have experienced running these and attending them over the years.

Blackmoor = Allan

Allan = Blackmoor

let's roll in the dirt.

Any time you try to judge something subscribe without a clear rubric, it will end in tears.

Let he who cast the first stone be free of sin.

G

I think if you are going to bother having a painting section of the scoring, a rubric should be provided. That said, there should also be discretionary judges input for (what they consider) exceptional paint jobs.

As for the idea of painting scores at all, I feel like they should be included if you are going to make a differentiation between "Best General" and "Best Overall". If you don't include painting scores in the mix, then "Best Overall" is little more than "Best General runner up with most Tiebreaker points". I like seeing competitions weighted more towards overall hobby ability instead of just the gaming portion.

Why shouldn't you include Battle Points, Sports and Paint/Modeling as three even sections of scoring? And if you are not, why not just make a three color table ready army the minimum bar for entry and make it 50/50 Battle/Sports? You can always give a prize for "Player Favorite Army" or "Best Appearance" or something like that so if someone wants to model and paint (or piss money away on paid painting) more than throw down, they can have a chance.

While this debate has been beat to death on two other forums it is nice to see so many liked minded people playing the game. (Read: Sarcasm) The good thing is that the Tourney organizers actually listened to the constructive feedback that was given over this issue and is making changes to make things better for next year.

And they personally made an effort to square things with the person who screwed over it. I say this so that when this thread goes nuts over this issue you now have the true and correct outcome of the debate from its source.

I believe Paint should be a fair part of the scores, after all that's what Best OVERALL means.

I think it is a terrible reflection on the paint judge that the winner of Best Painted has issues with the scoring.

Also, One person judging, having no checklist or standards, and having no time for judging whole armies and only judging during games is a sure way to get terrible results.

Congrats anyway, MB!

As pointed out the TOs made amends. How rare is that? Very rare indeed. It just shows that they listen and care. That is the bottom line and that makes a world of difference to me. I know that next year will be even better and I am planning to attend again. I can't say enough about anyone that actively seeks constructive feedback and seeks to improve.

G

Green Blow Fly wrote:As pointed out the TOs made amends. How rare is that? Very rare indeed. It just shows that they listen and care. That is the bottom line and that makes a world of difference to me. I know that next year will be even better and I am planning to attend again. I can't say enough about anyone that actively seeks constructive feedback and seeks to improve.

QFT. I had a great time at the event that shall not be named, even though not everything went the way I thought it should. TOs are in a tough spot and can never make everyone happy, but listening and trying to make things right proves good intent.

I'll be back next year for sure.

Let me say as well that I had a great time (how can you not when you win all your games?) and am glad to see the guys striving to improve. I am confident that they will do the right thing and endeavor to make the paint scores a bit easier to understand at least.

My Legion of Brass got 56% of the possible score. lol

I'm used to being scored lower in painting than armies that weren't completely painted. That, more than anything annoys me.

I've been to a couple tournaments where if you take a powerful list, your paint score gets tanked.

I believe painting should be a yes/no...Is it completely painted, then you get x amount of points. Then you can have everyone vote on thier favorite couple armies, and the ones with the most votes gets y amount of extra points.

Only 56% Nurgle? That is a little silly considering the ridiculous level of conversions.

The organizer is right that using checklists to evaluate artistic endeavours is stupid. Remember Robin Williams' line from Dead Poets Society? "We're not laying pipe, we're talking about poetry. I mean how can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? Well, I like Byron, I give him a 42."

HOWEVER, since in this case the painting DOES needs to be scored, ya gotta have some criteria. I'll be paint judging at The Mechanicon (www.themechanicon.com) in November, and we will use a checklist. That should help provide some context and structure to players' scores (and keep the judges more consistent).

One of the issues I have with checklists is that it's entirely possible to paint up an army that technically checks off many boxes but looks so-so in the end. Conversely, it's possible that an army might not use a lot of advanced painting techniques, but it all somehow comes together and really works. That's why our checklist will have just a few discretionary points that judges can award. Yes, that's subjective, but that should help boost armies in the latter category and create some separation between the armies that just check boxes and the armies that check boxes AND look great.

I don't think there was anything wrong with the paint judging at the event in question. I think the best army got the highest score. The real issue is the failure to adequately communicate the standards they would use so that players could prepare. For example, I was under the impression that a single unpainted model would prevent an army from receiving a paint score at all. But it didn't work out that way. I also thought that the painting score was closer to the sportsmanship scoring in that most people with halfway decent painting would get high scores. I didn't expect that the judge wanted golden daemon level painting for an entire army to get the maximum score. I also didn't think that the paint scoring was being used to determine best painted. I thought that would be a separate process.

a few discretionary points is good. completely subjectivity whims is not.

Is there a good template? Other than some check off items its pretty subjective isn't it?

Seriously what would be good template ideas?

blood angel wrote:a few discretionary points is good. completely subjectivity whims is not.

Subjectivity is not all that bad as long as the judging is applied consistently and fairly.

Well, it's all subjective in that a subjective number of points are being assigned to specific items. But if you look at the system GW used in their last GT season, most of the individual items aren't all that subjective. The items mostly center around particular painting techniques or whether certain aspects are or aren't there.

-Is the army highlighted?
-Is the army highlighted using blended highlights?
-Are the bases painted?
-Are the bases flocked?
-Are the bases flocked using multiple different materials (sand, static grass, etc.)?

That kind of thing. For The Mechanicon, we used the GW system as a starting point for ours, as it seems pretty solid and didn't seem to get *too* many complaints (all systems get complaints, so it's mostly about keeping them to a minimum).

As I said, the checklist leaves open the possibility of people painting to the checklist. It's totally possible we'll see an army with blended highlights, conversions, finished bases, etc. that scores well but looks completely garish thanks to dayglow colors, silly conversions or whatever. And that's why we put in just a couple subjective points. They won't fix that issue and nothing really will, but they help address it a little.

Again, I understand the mindset of that tourney organizer, but it's clear that complete subjectivity is not what most players want. They want things to be more clear-cut, so that's what we're giving them.

Thanks everyone for all your input. I think this has been constructive and helpful to me.

@ avantgarde ; I agree a panel is the best way to judge but this is not always a possibility depending on the event and player to TO ratio, but you would get more consistent well rounded judgment if you did. Preferably 1 person that could paint well and one who couldn't, so one could point out all the flaws and the other could ogle the good things about the army.

@ green blow fly ; I am happy you got everything worked out as it appears you have.

@ fellblade ; agreed! Rubrics let people know ahead of time what kind of score they can expect.

@ bikeninja ; I was aware of one forum on this subject and it more or less turned into a pissing match and had to be locked and I really only get on dakka for my WH/WH40k fix so I didn't know it had been beaten to death. The subject here is to kind of poll people if you will about the best/fairest way with to judge paint. I understand paint is a section that there will always be people that have gripes about no matter how you score it. The event cannot be run to please the impossible either. "Why didn't I get the 3 conversion points? I have 1 kit bashed model in the middle of 200 guardsmen." And so forth. No where have I said anything bad about the event (barring paint score) and out of all the TO's I've met their all super cool guys. I know the TO's listened to the feedback about the event and plan to address the few issues otherwise this thread would have been of horrid flaming N3rdRage. I didn't know that they had cleared thing up with John McJohnny but I can assure you it is a relief that they did. I also hope this thread stays constructive and doesn't go "nuts" as that was never my intention.

@ Nurgleboy77 ; Thanks! Are one of the guys that played against the now infamous player with lowest sports and half assembled models?

@ skyth ; Wow I've never been to a tournament where they take hard armies paint scores down! Guess I've been lucky... or clueless. I don't like players’ choice awards at bigger events as it can turn into popularity contests.

@ Blackmoor ; While true it's impossible to prove to a player (especially disgruntled player) that the judging was fair.

@ gorgon ; I like that system. We do something similar in the local scene. Check offs like that. One being "is the army painted with 3 colors and basing" worth 40% of paint total. Then the rest just adds points in small incriments then subjective is the tie breakers.

Thanks again for all the input and keeping it all positive!

Here were my thoughts around this topic - as a attendee of the tournament:

a) There needs to be a formal paint judging time. I suggest that it occur between the first and second game. Have an extended lunch time and have people set up their stuff to be judged. I also think that maybe the way to fix this is to work with the Square Basers. Get Square Baser judges to judge the 40K painting - and have the 40K people judge the square basers. That should minimize any conflict of interests etc. Also judges could play in the events that they aren't judging. The first day would go a little longer - but think it would work smoother. Another option would be to have it after the third game - that way anyone wanting to go play bloodbowl, gothic, etc. could leave their stuff set up and go do that.

b) Painting criteria - Ok - paint judging is always going to be subjective by it's nature. However I like the idea that you have a checklist of basic things - three colors, based, banners, shading, highlighted, etc. If that is met - you get X points - your base painting score. Then for the upper tier painted armies - have bonus points - bring in the subjective things - these highlights are superb, these are ok, etc. Maybe the "Base Painting" is what goes into the overall score - then the subjective points are what is used for "best painted"? That does a couple of good things. It makes the base painting criteria less subjective and something that people can wrap their arms around - a more tangible thing. It also streamlines the scoring for painting. Only the armies that are eligible for "Best Painted" and are potential contenders get the extra examination and reviews for the bonus points. An idea that I had while typing this up - if you have an army that is eligible and a contender for best painted - i.e. one of the top armies there - self painted - throw them an extra 5 points for the base painting that counts towards overall - thus making it still something important to the overall.

Aldonis wrote: I also think that maybe the way to fix this is to work with the Square Basers. Get Square Baser judges to judge the 40K painting - and have the 40K people judge the square basers. That should minimize any conflict of interests etc. Also judges could play in the events that they aren't judging.

Actually this is what I was suppose to do. Because of the delays of getting started we skipped lunch. I was going to give up my lunch break (playing in 40k side) to judge the fantasy side. I couln't however as we started 1 hour late and gave up our lunch. We had someone else jump in my place for 1 of the 2 paint judges.

Aldonis' comment:

a) There needs to be a formal paint judging time. I suggest that it occur between the first and second game.

While it seems good in writing, it cannot be practical. You really need a few minutes looking at each army and filling out the forms. If it takes 5 minutes per army and you have 60+ armies, you are looking at at least 5 hours for appearance judging. This means it is a large affair that needs to be approached properly.

If you go into an event with a good scoring system, good judges, and a proper approach the attendees will be pleased.

Since this seems to be about The Big Waaagh, I'll add some comments from the square-base side of the pond (ie: Battle on Beale).

The Fantasy scoring was, hands down, the worst I've ever seen at a tournament. This said, I'd steer clear of getting their "help" with paint scoring. As it seems with 40k, paint judging was done while games were played by a single person. That person would come by, look at a handful of dead models, glance across the board, then move on. What this meant is unless you had some REALLY obvious conversions, you likely lost those points. Also, if your nicely painted models died first, but the barely-3-color ones are on the table...then good scores for you!

Both of the above happened, one to me, and one to a friend of mine. His army was barely 3 color minimum. It had fully painted (blended highlights, etc) characters, a few nicely painted units, but overall wasn't finished by any means. He got points for "above average troops" since his good painted models happened to be chaos hounds and marauder horsemen. He somehow didn't get above average characters though. My army got full painting points, but missed conversion points. My lord (greater daemon) and every herald was a major conversion. I talked with the paint judge during the event and he went over the scoring of my army with me (which was very nice of him). Even fully setup he said he didn't see any conversions...I literally had to point out and barter my way into those points. I guess re-sculpting 1/3 of a Great Unclean One, merging a flamer/horror/sculpting Herald, unique palanquin w/ sculpted armor on the herald, etc. didn't count in his book.

On the same note, 2 of our team got scores lower than my friends barely-3-color list. One of them got the same paint score as another friend who drybrushed the entire army in 3 weeks. The army that got jacked was a fully converted Brettonian vampire counts army that was painted dark (as undead should be) but had blended highlights and tons of conversions.

On the fantasy side painting was worth the same as battle points. However with such a half-a**ed attempt at scoring it....I won't be back to the Battle on Beale next year. Even though I ended up with a 90/100 for painting, it left a pretty sour taste in my mouth how they ran things. This is just one of my issues with the event, but since this thread is about painting I'll leave it as just this.

@ Nurgleboy77 ; Thanks! Are one of the guys that played against the now infamous player with lowest sports and half assembled models?

Yeah, I played him in the last round. I really wish now I would have gone hardcore and made him pull off the 6 tanks that weren't WYSIWYG and I would have placed much higher. But I didn't want to be a dick. Apparently he was a dick a lot since he got worst Sportsmanship. Oh well!

Looking forward to next year, when I will have a purpose built army, gunning for Best Painted!

@ kenshin138; Sorry to hear about that. I think the painting on that side of the room was done better than our side, however I know paint will never satisfy everyone. It's Impossible.

@ Nurgleboy77; well then I've already got my models in from forgeworld for my next army and I'm not rushing this one. Sounds like the heat is on!

I already told Fishboy that he'd better bring his A-game next year because I was tired of seeing him prance up to the podium. "It's on like Donkey Kong!" lol