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Hulksmash wrote:@Blood Angel

As long as you recognize that part of the reason that the games weren't very exciting and things didn't happen much is the army you yourself brought to the event

Draigowing is hella boring to play against.

Pot meet kettle...

GK = GK

Hulksmash wrote:@Blood Angel

As long as you recognize that part of the reason that the games weren't very exciting and things didn't happen much is the army you yourself brought to the event

Draigowing is hella boring to play against.

Eh. That is half right. I play in tournaments all over the country and, of course, locally. There was a fundamental element of aggression missing from all of these missions.

Let me state - for the record - that I have nothing but respect for the tournament and how it was run but this year the missions were not of the same quality as in previous years. Would I have had the same opinion had I not played in them? No.. on the surface they read a lot differently than they play. It is what it is and ultimately the player should be playing the mission and not concerned with 'fun' but *i* like to have fun while I am tearing my opponents head off. This year most of my games were fairly boring because the missions didn't have enough elements that promote conflict of the armies on the table. Hulk, keep in mind that I won most of my games and qualified for day 2 for the second year in a row. I 'can' play any missions format and any tournament format - I just have a preference.

@target - no worries, man. I am in no way butt hurt over any losses I suffered over the weekend

@stormboy97 you are 100% correct. Armies tailored to the format are not the same armies you would see in a non Win or Go Home tournament. It is an over all easier format to play in where you don't have to be concerned with beating your opponent's army you just have to go second, skirt around, and swoop in on objectives at the end of the game. Some people like that style of play - I am just not one of them. I don't care what anyone says - these styles of tournaments are easier to play in than 'normal' battle point driven tournaments largely because you can just build a list that is tailored to do what I detailed in the first part of this paragraph.





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hyv3mynd wrote:

Hulksmash wrote:@Blood Angel

As long as you recognize that part of the reason that the games weren't very exciting and things didn't happen much is the army you yourself brought to the event

Draigowing is hella boring to play against.

This is exactly what I was thinking.

Yes, everyone is going to hide from a 1000pt deathstar that can shoot a full unit to death every turn and it nearly unbeatable in assault. The smart players will do their best to mitigate it and engage the fringe units in the army, leading to a chain of cat and mouse games.

Please don't delude yourself or the argument by thinking that I based this judgement only on my own games. I watched many games over the weekend and spoke to a large enough sample size of participants to feel confident that I am not out in the fringe with my assessment.

I am not casting dispersions on the tournament or the organizers. I am only making these comments in an effort to improve the missions for next year. It is likely 6th ed will change how missions are constructed anyway BUT I just want to make it clear that the combination of W/L games with slap fight mission objectives are BAD BAB BAD Feel me?

blood angel wrote:
@stormboy97 you are 100% correct. Armies tailored to the format are not the same armies you would see in a non Win or Go Home tournament. It is an over all easier format to play in where you don't have to be concerned with beating your opponent's army you just have to go second, skirt around, and swoop in on objectives at the end of the game. Some people like that style of play - I am just not one of them. I don't care what anyone says - these styles of tournaments are easier to play in than 'normal' battle point driven tournaments largely because you can just build a list that is tailored to do what I detailed in the first part of this paragraph.

I tend to agree here. I think one of the problems is the idea that in a Win-Loss format, you don't need three goals. Three goals in a battle-point tournament allow better players to distinguish themselves by accomplishing more goals. But in a Win/Loss event, three missions simply allows a player to ignore one of the goals. If the goal that fosters more aggressive play is the one ignored, then you get games as mentioned above.

I actually think that Win/Loss events would be better balanced if they simply took the book missions and divided them between the number of games. It would force people to have to play each mission type at least once, not just ignore the types that their army doesn't do well.

You need multiple objectives for w-l to make sure you have tie breakers in place.

Redbeard wrote:

blood angel wrote:
@stormboy97 you are 100% correct. Armies tailored to the format are not the same armies you would see in a non Win or Go Home tournament. It is an over all easier format to play in where you don't have to be concerned with beating your opponent's army you just have to go second, skirt around, and swoop in on objectives at the end of the game. Some people like that style of play - I am just not one of them. I don't care what anyone says - these styles of tournaments are easier to play in than 'normal' battle point driven tournaments largely because you can just build a list that is tailored to do what I detailed in the first part of this paragraph.

I tend to agree here. I think one of the problems is the idea that in a Win-Loss format, you don't need three goals. Three goals in a battle-point tournament allow better players to distinguish themselves by accomplishing more goals. But in a Win/Loss event, three missions simply allows a player to ignore one of the goals. If the goal that fosters more aggressive play is the one ignored, then you get games as mentioned above.

I actually think that Win/Loss events would be better balanced if they simply took the book missions and divided them between the number of games. It would force people to have to play each mission type at least once, not just ignore the types that their army doesn't do well.

In support of this, our tournaments have been much more functional as competitive environments since we stopped simply using win/loss with KP tie breakers with book missions. Having primary, secondary, and tertiary missions create scenarios that are much more balanced by encouraging the formation of armies that must be multifaceted. It's also a form of soft balancing that tournaments do to prevent people from just making armies designed to table opponents as quickly as possible. It would of been nice if the games actual designers had some concept of play balance when they wrote the only three missions they gave initially.


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-666- wrote:You need multiple objectives for w-l to make sure you have tie breakers in place.

You can tie break off of KP or VP, but that just encourages a tabling based meta that some armies suffer under greatly.

-666- wrote:You need multiple objectives for w-l to make sure you have tie breakers in place.

I think the rulebook has that covered quite adequately under "Victory Points".

You do need multiple objectives for w-l, though AdeptiCon did. I'm personally not as big a fan of objectives such as Marked for Death, b/c of the possibility that someone can snag it, hide their marked unit (Reserves, etc., sometimes an army has a keypoint unit or aura-generator and they can't afford to reserve or hide their marked unit ... encourages armies that have no meaningful centerpoint, so whatever is marked can be readily hidden / reserved), and play keepaway until the end, where they try to snag another objective suited to their build. Marked for Death, just like the "Nominate 5" used by a certain someone-not-named-on-Dakka, creates advantages for spammy MSU armies without any keypoint units. Kinda the opposite of what Kill Points tries to encourage.

That said, one of the advantages you sometimes see in w/l is the ability for many MORE armies to be able to 'hang in there' and stay in contention with a series of tight wins by doing something OTHER than clashing together and rolling dice, or sitting back shooting and rolling dice. If keeping my army in-tact and battling for the close win is an acceptable strategy, I don't need to have a min-maxed or rock-paper-scissors list ... I still COULD go with that, but I don't have to.

On a personal level, I enjoy playing in a wide variety of formats. Sometimes it's a lot of fun to go into an event and scrap for every single possible point, and play face-beater armies while hoping you don't get too crappy a match-up in the wrong mission ... not saying it tongue in cheek either, that's just my impression of battle points, and I've enjoyed every BP tournament I've personally played in.

Frankly I'm probably dumb, as I don't adjust my list for it really at all ... bringing bare-win, body-heavy lists full of close range assault and/or firepower, and tangling with the movement phase in close and tight. I love having a game be won by me OR my opponent at the end, by the skin of one of our teeth ... always feels like the best games (I'm looking at Alex Fennell here, and our game at BFS ... tri-raider BA against close-ranged straken mech guard).

Mission design is a funky thing ... and sometimes it's certainly possible that the combination of army match-up and which 3 missions are combined at AdeptiCon creates more of a situation where it's 'get an early lead, then play keepaway and draw the other 2,' as may have happened in Tony vs Paul ... but it's hard to be "perfect" when there are so many potential match-ups. In a sense, that's the benefit of w/l ... you have to worry less about what match-ups you might draw, and more about bringing a list that can broadly contend for at least a minimal win against ANY match-up ... as long as the mission doesn't combo with the match to create something too wonky or boring, you're going to find yourself in a situation where you have a TON of close games, and one might argue a plenty fun time.

It only gets tricky when you start to broadly say things like 'more fun.' I think MOST tournaments are a blast, and the 'better' or not of w/l, battlepoints, w/l/d, etc., is at best in the eye of the individual beholder.

Re: Redbeard, this is why some w/l events do tiered missions, where the primary is the w/l condition, and the 2ndary/tertiary are tiebreakers, so that you have to at least fight for a draw on primary until the very end, instead of simply ignoring it / giving it away, and focusing on winning the 2 secondaries, or drawing one / winning one and pushing to VP.

AdeptiCon addresses this somewhat, though, by having KP in nearly every mission, so you are handicapped from the get-go if you ignore that.

W-L with multiple objectives helps prevent bad matchups.

ShumaGorath wrote:
In support of this, our tournaments have been much more functional as competitive environments since we stopped simply using win/loss with KP tie breakers with book missions. Having primary, secondary, and tertiary missions create scenarios that are much more balanced by encouraging the formation of armies that must be multifaceted.

I hear this argument a lot. And yet, I don't think that many of these additional missions are always reasonable. The rulebook tells you what your army should be capable of doing. Can it hold some objectives - or prevent an opponent from doing the same? Can it score kill points? If I design an army that can do these things, that's what the game should be about. Whether it can do other things is irrelevant, they're not really part of the game. Unless you announce, well ahead of the game, what the alternate missions are going to be, it seems like you have the potential to catch some armies in situations that they're not able to complete - because they've no reason to be designed to complete them.

Some alternative missions I've seen in the past include:

Get units to your opponent's deployment zone. That's nice for all-mech armies. But take a foot army - one that can shoot an opponent off a far objective - they now either have to hoof it, forgoing shooting, or not get there. This isn't reasonable.

Hold the center of the table: This is, in essence, a one objective game. There's a reason there aren't one-objective missions in the rulebook; they are strongly biased towards mass-based resilient armies. If I know I have to play a one-objective mission, I'm more likely to look into a deathstar army than if I know I need to (as the book tells us) hold multiple objectives.

It's also a form of soft balancing that tournaments do to prevent people from just making armies designed to table opponents as quickly as possible. It would of been nice if the games actual designers had some concept of play balance when they wrote the only three missions they gave initially.

I actually think they did a good job of creating balance in the three mission types. GWs lack of balance doesn't stem from the missions. Two-of-three are not simply about killing your opponent, and the one that is serves a vital balancing role between the innate advantages provided by MSU design and more mass-oriented armies.

@-666-

Oh I played GK but I'm pretty sure I was the only all foot attendee using 4 Strike Squads and 2 Dreadknights You get to kill models when you play my army

@Stormboy & Bloodangel

I think the problem lies more in the 3 objectives active at all times than in the w/l format. If it was single objective each game with tie break secondary & tertiary it changes significantly. The basic problem I see is that KP were active again in 3/4 of the games and that can heavily sku the way the game is played. I know it kept me from bringing Bugs this year. Mix that up and you mix up the results.

I also don't believe that BP tournaments are more difficult than w/l. For the general track they each have their plus and minuses. BP's work better themselves the more games there are (higher end players spend more time beating on each other) but by this does require a significant number of rounds (7+). Outside of that pure w/l is better if you can get the rounds.

@Bloodangel

I never said I was 100% right. I said part of the issue you had was increased by the type of army you brought. Glad you agree

@Stormboy

I do think that W/L gives fringe armies a higher chance at the title and I've given it a lot of thought

Here is the thing. For the general track if you have two guys. One who goes undefeated with moderate wins playing say, tyranids and one who lost a game but purely slaughtered his other 4 opponents. Who is the better general? According to this the guy who lost. This, in a nutshell, is my problem with BP's in low game format GT events (i.e. 4-6). Around 7+ games I can see it easily leveling out.

Just my two cents on this stuff

I hear this argument a lot. And yet, I don't think that many of these additional missions are always reasonable. The rulebook tells you what your army should be capable of doing. Can it hold some objectives - or prevent an opponent from doing the same? Can it score kill points? If I design an army that can do these things, that's what the game should be about. Whether it can do other things is irrelevant, they're not really part of the game. Unless you announce, well ahead of the game, what the alternate missions are going to be, it seems like you have the potential to catch some armies in situations that they're not able to complete - because they've no reason to be designed to complete them.

I can see the reasoning there, but the actual makeup of the book missions encourages an army that needs to be able to hold one objective at most, contest another sometimes, and table the opponent as fast as possible. Only one in three missions will feature an objective type that doesn't eventually turn into kill points or victory points. Sure, you can have some daring late game raid to contest your opponents objectve in tie-mission, but really everyone just goes for the table and then wins on tiebreakers in that (unless they're running eldar or get really lucky with a vendetta or something). If that mission devolves into "kill them" and the "kill them" mission starts that way than all you really need to do is have enough firepower to kill the opposing troop choices and hold one objective in the final.

You can play these missions with varied forces and try to do the "intended" objective in each mission, but in my experience people don't, and if they really worked as intended you wouldn't see a mass exodus from them.

Get units to your opponent's deployment zone. That's nice for all-mech armies. But take a foot army - one that can shoot an opponent off a far objective - they now either have to hoof it, forgoing shooting, or not get there. This isn't reasonable.

Which is little different than when I place my home objective on the table edge in the least popular book mission.

The beauty of the w-l format is you have one winner at the end who has won all their games. To me BPs have always seemed a bit murky at times.

@-666-

To be fair I think BP's can work at higher game numbers. I just don't like it at 4-6 game levels. And it's a necessary evil at the RTT level

BPs can work but it is not as readily transparent.

ShumaGorath wrote:
but really everyone just goes for the table and then wins on tiebreakers

This is simply not my experience.

Get units to your opponent's deployment zone. That's nice for all-mech armies. But take a foot army - one that can shoot an opponent off a far objective - they now either have to hoof it, forgoing shooting, or not get there. This isn't reasonable.

Which is little different than when I place my home objective on the table edge in the least popular book mission.

You don't think so? Having your objective on the table means that if I hold back a deepstriker, you now have to guard against it getting your objective. It means I can reserve a valkyrie, and you need to decide what, if anything, you're going to hold back to stop me from getting to your objective in the late game. Having your objective on the table, even at a table edge, means that a more mobile player can make you split your forces or get a draw at best. That doesn't happen in a true one-objective game.

This is simply not my experience.

It really depends on how they do tie breakers. If the tie breaker is KP most parking lots/long fang spam/draigowings/necron... stuff/ anything else with great firepower are much better off not even bothering with the objective and just annihilating the opponents half effort at pushing up field.

You don't think so? Having your objective on the table means that if I hold back a deepstriker, you now have to guard against it getting your objective. It means I can reserve a valkyrie, and you need to decide what, if anything, you're going to hold back to stop me from getting to your objective in the late game. Having your objective on the table, even at a table edge, means that a more mobile player can make you split your forces or get a draw at best. That doesn't happen in a true one-objective game.

You can do the same with a mission that requires you to put things into a deployment zone. It doesn't really effect the game plan for orks, tyranids, or blood angels in my experience. Either way they're going to drive right down your throat.

What are the chances of a 10man terminator squad thss, with a null zone libby and Vulkan beating a Draigo 10 man Paladin squad? Termies getting the charge.

Paladins have 2 swords, 2 hammers, 5 halberds, banner. draigo and a techmarines harness.

Julnlecs wrote:What are the chances of a 10man terminator squad thss, with a null zone libby and Vulkan beating a Draigo 10 man Paladin squad? Termies getting the charge.

Paladins have 2 swords, 2 hammers, 5 halberds, banner. draigo and a techmarines harness.

Depends on if they have the various grenades and if you can get null zone off successfully. You'll have a hard time getting to combat with a full squad though, they'll deal you wounds on the way in.

Redbeard wrote:

ShumaGorath wrote:
but really everyone just goes for the table and then wins on tiebreakers

This is simply not my experience.

Agreed.

The better players I know have a plan to achieve the mission objectives and work within those guidelines.

I think that is what sets the really good Players apart from the rest. Staying on track and focused on the set mission objective(s) is a pretty big part of keeping a consistent winning record.

What separates the Top players from the rest is when you can spot that moment when your opponent deviates from the objective(s) and take advantage of it. Maybe even have a part in helping them deviate in the first place.

Playing for the table is really foreign to my experience. I can't remember the last time I ever made that a goal. One of the weird things about playing the double-Stormraven list I designed for the team tournament was also that it was a list which pretty much jumped down the enemy's throat every game, which is weird and unusual for me.

Monster Rain wrote:

Redbeard wrote:

ShumaGorath wrote:
but really everyone just goes for the table and then wins on tiebreakers

This is simply not my experience.

Agreed.

The better players I know have a plan to achieve the mission objectives and work within those guidelines.

It was a pretty hot topic for GTs and adepticon when guard were gaining max popularity. I think they've moved to missions that alleviated the issue more recently.

I agree, going for the table was a legitimate tactic back in the day a few years ago.

The 40K Championships are designed to guarantee a single definitive winner from a field of 256 players. It does that well. I do, however, dislike the 3 objectives thing. It' supposed to give all types of army an ability to win games in different ways, but because of the relatively limited number and kind of objectives, there are really only two kinds of builds that are consistent - kp denial and ability to seize one, or objective-holding spam. A ridiculous premium is also put onto resilience and durability.

I went (obviously) with the kp denial (9 total kill points) and holding a single objective. I also went for durability, hence fateweaver. It worked pretty well for me, despite my showing on Sunday. But I don't see many other daemon builds, given the mission structure/format, that I could have used with similar effectiveness. In a way, the system itself is a reaction to the previous battlepoint system, which often had problems determining a clear winner and also encouraged specific builds and outcomes, such as tabling.

We deal with similar problems in the 40K Gladiator, but Greg and I (we both designed the current mission structure, even though I was obviously not running it this year) decided to try and make our theme (as always) "screw everyone." That is, we wanted everyone to feel that a mission is challenging to their army and playing style. That's why we came up with the progressive/endgame mission structure, where battle points are earned for in-game activities as well as the condition of the battlefield at game's end. In addition, we tried to make the progressive and end-game objectives as contradictory as possible, to force players to perform a balancing act between aggressive engagement and defensive protection. We've only got two years worth of data at this point, but the results (from an outcome perspective) are promising.

I have to say tournaments where the only way to get max points is to table all of your opponents make for bitter competition and an overall unpleasent experience.

Unholy_Martyr wrote:I have to say tournaments where the only way to get max points is to table all of your opponents make for bitter competition and an overall unpleasent experience.

I agree.

Unholy_Martyr wrote:I have to say tournaments where the only way to get max points is to table all of your opponents make for bitter competition and an overall unpleasent experience.

I disagree. I love games that end with a single total model, mine or my opponent's left standing. I don't mind getting tabled and I will murder every last enemy model I can even if there is no mission objective attached to doing so.

What makes for bitter competition is people forgetting that we are generally grown men playing with toy soldiers, and instead taking the results of a game of toy soldiers to somehow mean something about themselves. There is nothing inherently bitter about pursuing any legitimate methodology for winning the game, including killing every model or turn 5 Eldar objective blitzing.

It's possible to write up the same number of pros and cons for battle points and w/L. It's going to come down to personal preference.

I like W/L better because I like the things that it encourages/emphasizes. I like having only one guy be undefeated at the end of the weekend. I don't mind being "knocked out" after a single loss. I kind of like the pressure/ intensity that adds to every game. I like rewarding consistent winning, even narrow winning, over big wins mixed with losses.

Someone else might think the ability to play back from a loss is more important than having one undisputed winner. Or they might think that a couple of big wins should be equal or more valued than a many very narrow wins (I disagree with this but again, personal taste).

It's all a value judgment. I think the great thing is that the community is big enough and healthy enough that it can support large events of both varieties. If you like one over the other there are tournaments running both systems.



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MVBrandt wrote:You do need multiple objectives for w-l

10000% agree. The format is unforgiving enough. If you have only one objective, or one that is weighed much more heavily than the othersthe others then your entire weekend is completely subject to one bad matchup. Multiple objectives gives you a way to play through bad matchups. There are many paths to victory, not just one.

MVBrandt wrote:That said, one of the advantages you sometimes see in w/l is the ability for many MORE armies to be able to 'hang in there' and stay in contention with a series of tight wins by doing something OTHER than clashing together and rolling dice, or sitting back shooting and rolling dice. If keeping my army in-tact and battling for the close win is an acceptable strategy, I don't need to have a min-maxed or rock-paper-scissors list ... I still COULD go with that, but I don't have to.

I couldn't agree more. And this is the thing that W/L encourages that I like the most. I feel like I can build an army that can be successful out of most books in the W/L format. If I have to build any army for battle points the books I feel comfortable playing out of are very few. Grey knights aside, this years and last years top 16 qualifiers were actually pretty diverse. I think that's a direct result of the format.

@jwolf

I think you may have misunderstood what I was getting at. Recently, I attended an event that had 3 missions that were completely different yet the only way to achieve max points in all of the missions was to table your opponent. That creates a whole new atmosphere to an event that in many ways makes for an overall undesirable experience.

While I did table one opponent and nearly did it a 2nd time, I found many other players completely disregarding the objectives of the missions and turning all of the games into Annihilation scenarios. At that point, I may as well sit at my local store and play kill points all day. Also, I had to remind one opponent of the mission objectives because he was losing on Annihilation but was in control of the objective. I garner no enjoyment from such situations.

@ Unholy_Martyr

Uggh, that sounds like purely bad mission design. I agree that missions that are designed so poorly as to have only Wipeout! as a possible "winning" option are at best boring. Thankfully that was a 3-game RTT, so at least you only had one day of bad mission.

At this point it seems like we all have seen the same valid points made in favor or against BP as well as W/L formats. To me it doesn't seem like one is truly superior, they are pretty closely matched.

I agree with everything Bill said so now I would really like to see these Gladiator missions. Just need some free time to read them.