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The ringer should count as a "bye" for whoever plays him, and therefore shouldn't have any bearing on who wins the tournament overall.

The purpose of the ringer is not to challenge the players, it's to give them a good game instead of sitting around watching everyone else play.

don_mondo wrote:

OverwatchCNC wrote:
The TO should never be the ringer.

Sometimes you have no choice. One of my tourneys a few years back, had a ringer just in case, but even matchups so didn't need him. At the end of the first round one of the players had to leave due to a family emergency. Unfortunately, his ride was the ringer. And the player that had to leave was vision impaired (yes, blind, and played 40K), so we couldn't just toss him the keys and say 'see ya'. Best laid plans and all that. So I had to run out to my car and pull out my IG to even things up.

whoa... i think i know that dude... the vision impared one... he played ultra marines right?

Nice dude all the same. Hell of a player even though he was blind.

ALSO...

A ringer is a neccessary evil...

frgsinwntr wrote:

don_mondo wrote:

OverwatchCNC wrote:
The TO should never be the ringer.

Sometimes you have no choice. One of my tourneys a few years back, had a ringer just in case, but even matchups so didn't need him. At the end of the first round one of the players had to leave due to a family emergency. Unfortunately, his ride was the ringer. And the player that had to leave was vision impaired (yes, blind, and played 40K), so we couldn't just toss him the keys and say 'see ya'. Best laid plans and all that. So I had to run out to my car and pull out my IG to even things up.

whoa... i think i know that dude... the vision impared one... he played ultra marines right?

Nice dude all the same. Hell of a player even though he was blind.

ALSO...

A ringer is a neccessary evil...

Yep, great guy. IIRC, he was playing Deathwing at that tourney, but I think He does have a UM army as well as a couple of others. He tries to play low model count, uses a box for dice rolling. Even does most of his own movement with a little descriptive help from his opponent for the lay of the land and approximate distances. And any time he's attended one of my events, his table is the one right by the judges desk just in case some a-hole wants to try and take advantage. Baltimore area. Haven't seen him in several years tho, so not sure what he's doing these days.

Phazael wrote:Actually, the TO is ideal for the ringer, provided he knows how to lose gracefully without making it look like he blatantly took a dive. The only issue is not being able to answer questions and watch for cheating on other tables. The TO is not competing, so he has no dog in the fight, anyhow.

He has a dog in the fight. Having played one of the members of field he now has a direct opinion on that player as an opponent. When determining best sports, or best painted army the TOs opponent now has a distinct advantage or disadvantage to winning either of those awards depending upon how the game went.

In one case the TO can't vote for his favorite opponent/Best painted army and so that player loses out on the potential of winning either of those votes. (assuming you must vote best painted out of the armies you played only, which is dumb but I have seen that)

If the TO can vote and is the ringer for round 1 only then that player will automatically get those votes from the TO.

There are other issues to a ringer, in general that simply can't be solved like voting, that can be exacerbated by a less than ethical TO. That's why I prefer non-TO ringers. Worst case though, I would rather someone get a game than not. Being the buy will generally suck for you no matter what happens so you may as well play a game I suppose.

The TO should also only play a ringer if he has judges to help with disputes at other tables.

pretre wrote:The TO should also only play a ringer if he has judges to help with disputes at other tables.

Good point, especially if the event has more than 10 tables or so. The larger the event the less I like seeing the TO as a ringer.

The purpose of the ringer is to keep the number of players in a tournament even. Usually the ringer stays at the bottom table regardless of their w/d/l record. When the ringer stays at the bottom table it doesn't matter how good or how bad the ringer does in the tournament. If the ringer is a new or rusty player with an noncompetitive list then the guys at the bottom table get an easy win. If the ringer is a mean SOB then the guys at the bottom table get to play a tough player instead of other bottom tier players without having to worry about their own w/l/d record because they are already at the bottom table.

Na, the guy that rage-quit was why the Stand-in stopped playing after round 2 and the top 4 never had to face him.

On the bright side, I was on the right path to at least pull a draw and maybe even squeek out a potential win...until rounds 5-6-and 7 (yep...to the bitter end) My dice failed with disasterous results.
The epiphany struck and as long as I can pull average dice rolls Psifleman+Henchmen/Psiback lists should be a lot easier to deal with.
So all was not a total loss on the day.

BTW, the game itself was fun and the player was a blast to go against. He knew his Army and really made you think your next moves through. No complaints on that end and I wouldn't mind playing him more often.
The event itself was well run with good behaviour (for the most part...rage guy excluded). A tough crowd with quite the mix of local meta (Dark Eldar and Necrons were well represented).

But if the tourney (like so many 40k ones are moving to) is straight up win loss, what does it matter? Giving someone a free win is worse when winning the game is all that matters. There were no sportsman votes or so on, so no possibility for bias in the voting.

For refference, the event in question had no soft scores at all and was decided on W/L with side objectives giving extra battle points for tie breakers only. I went 2-0-2 and had max bonus points (scored the most bp of anyone) without playing the ringer. And considering that I came in third and played the two people who placed ahead of me(my two draws), I think its fair to say the top finnishers all got tough games.

So I guess the question is, it worse that you got what amounted to a tough early draw (can happen to anyone, ask Dave or Tom, who played round two) and came up short, or would it be worse if someone in my position got knocked out because the ringer rolled over and died for max points to someone? A bad draw is just a bad draw. Accept it and move on.

Really, if we as a community want to go with the win or go home system as our standard tournament format, then we need to accept that Ringers need to be competitive for the field to be fair. I am sure the guys who draw Tony, Alan, or Reece randomly at the Nova or Adepticon for their round one opponent have a good reason to be bitter if another guy gets Fluffy McFlufferstien the Ringer for an easy win. A lot more than if they pull ringer and its Cheese Wolf Long Wang Spam as the ringer army run by a novice.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
PS I do agree that after one or two games, the ringer needs to dial it back, since anyone they are likely playing at that point is just playing for fun. The ringer should never play anywhere but the bottom table, though. If you won game one and then faced a ringer army, then that is a mistake, in my view.

Plus, really, don't say the top guys had an easy run. Tom had to face both my space monkey army and Dave Fey. I faced mech guard on planet bowling ball with all of one meltagun in my army for round one, then Chris's tripple ghaz waggon Orgs (1st place guy), and Tom's crons. The easiest game I had all day was against a Israel's crons and that was just a case of matchup disparity (and he still almost drew me) with my army being perfectly suited to take his on. Chris, who won, played all people who were undefeated at the time he faced them, as well, including me and a solid looking DE Raider rush army in a DoW Sieze and Control game, so maybe he had one easy game round one? For being a one day small store event, there were actually a lot of good player and armies there.

I think the way ringers are handled at my FLGS is probably one of the best. You play the ringer but worst you can score is a draw, even if you are tabled. You can however score max points against the ringer. Also I believe our ringer plays only people from the bottom half of the field. Might be the last place guy but I am not sure.

"Ringer" (fill in player) always stays on the bottom table. Round 1 it's random (unless you have a real newbie who's playing just to learn, then that's an ideal matchup).

I favor having it be an experienced player using a well-painted army with a decent variety of units; not a power list. Something reasonably competitive but not spammy. If the TO is stuck doing it himself (this happened to me once), it needs to be something he can play fast and knows the rules for backwards and forwards, so he can keep the game relatively quick and get back to judging/organizing.

I think the best way to do it, is to give a bye, but put in a sort of "ringer", just so the person with the bye doesn't have to sit out. They should still get a bye, but they should also get a game, they payed for 3/4/5 games, why shouldn't they get them?

Phazael wrote:Actually, the TO is ideal for the ringer, provided he knows how to lose gracefully without making it look like he blatantly took a dive. The only issue is not being able to answer questions and watch for cheating on other tables. The TO is not competing, so he has no dog in the fight, anyhow.

To me this is no better than awarding a player a bye during each round. Sure if the ringer is playing against the person with the worst record each round it doesn't seem like it would make a big difference but still I think the ringer should play each game competively.

Sorry that I did not respond early, but computers at work block Dakka Dakka.

I was the TO at the event. I am the TO because out of our small local community, I am the only one who has both the desire and enough rules acumen to run an event. I would like to be playing for prizes, but the necessity of having a TO at events means that the community comes first.

We as a gaming community have elected to not use a bye because as has been previously stated what do you do? Give the player max points, a draw, or a loss? There is no fair way to have a bye in a win/loss format which is what we have gone to at our local store with Battle Points being the first tie breaker, and tournament points the third tie breaker.

We have also debated what type of army the “ringer” should play. After discussion between me and other players at the store, we decided that the “ringer” needs to play like he is trying to win the event and be paired by the computer like a regular player in the tournament.

If you instead have him just play the bottom player, this unfairly punishes his first opponent if by chance he gets matched up against a solid player and beats him. By having the “ringer” play like everyone else, this eliminates this possibility and then everyone has the same chance of playing the “ringer” given his and their performance in a tournament. Even if the “ringer” wins all of his games, he is not eligible for any prize support.

At Kingdom-Con the “ringer” was undefeated and was dropped on day two because there was a drop (the same person who rage quit this tournament FYI). So having the ringer play as part of the field is by no means a new concept, and is the only way to keep a win/loss pairing fair to all participants.

Secondly, I would like to say thanks for the nice comments…..

Phazael wrote:
ps- I was at the event the OP is complaining about. The list was pretty strong, but Magilla is not unfun to play. Please tell me you are not the guy who ragequit after round two, because even the mighty Dave Fey stuck it out with a 1-2-1 record on the day with a sunny disposition the whole time.

dkellyj wrote:
BTW, the game itself was fun and the player was a blast to go against. He knew his Army and really made you think your next moves through. No complaints on that end and I wouldn't mind playing him more often.
The event itself was well run with good behaviour (for the most part...rage guy excluded). A tough crowd with quite the mix of local meta (Dark Eldar and Necrons were well represented).

…and I would gladly play you again Kelly as you were a great opponent. I would not like to play Phazael as he keeps beating me in games, especially team games!

It's been so long since we did the "stand-in/ringer" thing I can't even remember what we do for pairings. I know that almost all the local judges usually bring an army just in case, but we usually have more than one, so an extra judge will generally just enter the event normally. I do remember once in the last year where I've had to use a bye in an 19 person tournament, I was the only one judging, and didn't want to stretch myself too thin trying to play too. I was giving the person with the bye the equivalent of a minor win with no bonuses. It seemed to work out well, but I would prefer not having to do that.

I generally agree with Magilla that the Ringer shouldn't just be someone padding their opponents score. They should be giving their opponent a game, no letting them win. Whether they're paired as normal, or not doesn't much matter, as someone could be knocked out of them by a random first round pairing as easily as knocked out in a late round. May as well just make them a part of the tournament, and hope your take-all-comers list can take theirs too.

As someone who was at this tournament and actually had a lovely time:

Magilla Gurilla actually asked me what type of army I thought he should run. He was open to running a less competitive list, but was thinking of bringing his GKs which are beautifully painted. I told him to bring his competitive GK list, and there are three reasons why. First of all, as I said, the army is extremely nice to look at. It was painted by Granesh over at Smells Like Wargaming who does a fantastic job, and who doesn't like playing against an aesthetically pleasing army? Had we been awarding a best painted army I think Mags would have been up there with Dave and that Dark Eldar player (Brandon, I think). Secondly, I'm of the opinion that a "ringer" (aka Stand In) should play as though they have the same vested interest in the game as anyone else. Otherwise, I feel it cheapens the experience of the whole tournament with people getting easy wins. If you're going to have a ringer, they should play the game. If not, just give the bye (which I'm not really crazy about). Thirdly, I specifically engineered my Necron list to beat Magilla Gurilla's GK list, so naturally I demanded that he bring that list to the tournament.



Had Mags won the whole thing, everyone would have been moved up a space and everything would have been fine. I'm more irritated with the people that decided to drop out of the tournament when they racked up a couple of losses that necessitated the ringer to drop out.

steinerp wrote:Ringer/stand-in should play a dedicated game just as if they were actually playing in the tournament.

Yes. I agree.

dkellyj wrote:Na, the guy that rage-quit was why the Stand-in stopped playing after round 2 and the top 4 never had to face him.

This is the source of the issue. The title of the thread should really be: If you enter a tournament, don't get butt-hurt and bail once you're out of the running because it causes systematic problems. Frankly, I would have welcomed the chance to play any of the stronger lists at this tournament. I thought that it was awesome that so many people showed, and I hope that this doesn't sour relations with our other gaming groups in the region. I only wish that it had been a five game tourney so I could have had a shot at our first place finisher.

Again, I had a great time and think that TSG and Magilla Gurilla run excellent events. I'd just like the following statement to sum up the basic feeling I have about this gaming scene, as it is both extremely awesome and true.

Magilla Gurilla wrote:I was the TO at the event. I am the TO because out of our small local community, I am the only one who has both the desire and enough rules acumen to run an event. I would like to be playing for prizes, but the necessity of having a TO at events means that the community comes first.

He puts in a lot of work for this area's 40k scene, and I think he deserves to get in a few games here and there at a tournament as he genuinely loves wargaming. As the TO this doesn't happen with a bye system in place.

I think a good solution in a straight win-loss is to offer someone who is coming up on the bye round either a draw with max tiebreaker points or the option to play a ringer with a competitive army. There is no reason to give someone a free win if a stand-in is available. This also should alleviate any butt-hurtedness in the mind of the player with the bye as they chose their fate and knew full well what they were doing.

You should always have to earn your wins in tournaments imo.

I agree with Monster Rain on a lot of this, and applaud Magilla Gurilla.

I've been the TO and ringer, and it was for a smaller event. I had to ask myself all the same questions. In the end, I offered anyone who got a bye the opportunity to take draw points (half), or they could play my competitive IG list in a competitive game and actually figure those points for them.

It was a more casual tournament, but I would have done in the same in a larger and more competitive environment had that been the case. As stated earlier, you come play in tournaments to win (in most cases). You don't want to show up and not play, and you came to play a competitive game. So I ask why shouldn't the ringer bring a competitive list and game? I think players should be given the option of a bye or to play the ringer, so that they have a choice. They also should also know what they're getting themselves into either way though. But if they decide to play, they should treat it and it should be treat it just like playing any other player.

Yes, it messes up the best sportsmanship scoring if there is one, but if the TO is willing to judge fairly on that (I'm entirely aware of that statement), then there should no problems with the ringer judging those they play against on sportsmanship.

@ OP

Ringer should always play as close to last place as possible. A bye has just as many problems with it as a ringer, plus the person on the receiving end loses a game.

Ringer armies should probably be designed to fit in with what is expected at the event. Even still, I'd hesitate the put a super competitive army as the ringer, since you'll be playing people who have been losing all day or possibly weekend.

I wasn't able to attend this tournament as I would have liked, however I'll share my .02

If I understand Kelly's original post, his main problem was that the ringer army went undefeated, yet didn't get to complete all of the games in the tourney. So, the players on the top table didn't have to face it since someone dropped out.

Now, at that point it is easy to point the blame at the guy who left early and dropped out. I don't know who that person is and it really doesn't matter, but what if it was someone who had an emergency and had to go in a hurry? The point is that people drop out for unexpected reasons. It is unfortunate, but it happens...

Honestly this is why the ringer army really shouldn't be too competitive. In the first round, who draws the ringer army is completely random. However, after the first round the guys that play the ringer army should be the guys that are out of the running. This way, if someone drops, it isn't that big of a loss... However, if the ringer army is playing on a competitive level and someone drops, then the whole scale doesn't slide as it was intended, but instead the only players that slide on the scale were the ones that faced the ringer army. Make sense?

In a bigger tournament with more players, deeper scoring, and more rounds this might not be as big of an issue. However, in a 4-round setting with a small number of players, it can be a much bigger issue.

its a matter of knowing your audience and how many rounds you're playing. The store owner/TO should know the group of guys at the tournament as he would have their lists in advance. If the players are going to be super competitive, then the ringer should match them. If the tournament is for fun, the ringer should be told not to be super competitive. If the tournament is filled with noobs, then the list should be relatively soft. The ringer shouldn't be a guranteed win, it should be like playing anyone else there.

I'm blessed with living in Orlando, FL where we have 5 independent stores and a GW shop within the Metropolitan area. If you go an hour outside of Orlando, there are 8 shops. With a tournament almost every weekend at each shop you run into different types of tournaments - some are geared to get the competitive people, some are true RTT's, and some are for the people just getting into the hobby. If I'm playing in a Noob friendly tournament, I've always given my prize to someone that looks like they need to add something to their army. I've been playing 40K and Fantasy so long, I only want to get 3 games in and hang out with my friends. Work and family tend to take up the majority of my time - a tournament just gives me the environment that I can get 3 games in. I gave up on the large scale tournaments when I started traveling more than 75% of my time for work.

Ringer should be unranked and playing the bottom seed.

This ends up solving itself after round 1 as often the ringer ends up playing an inexperienced person and ends up kinda going from ringer to gaming mentor.

If someone is going to use a store army and play, and be ranked, then he is not a ringer, he is a participant.

Monster Rain wrote: I only wish that it had been a five game tourney so I could have had a shot at our first place finisher.

WHAT B!%# YOU WANNA GO.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I see two problems with the ringer .I think the ringer should be on the bottom table to keep the top half as fair as possible.But the bottom table in most RTTs is someone who in most cases is not that competitive. Taking a rape your face as fast as i can army will not be fun for the other guy to play against and should be a little more tame BUT that messes up the first round if it is giving someone a easy win since they faced a easy list.I like the idea of taking a strong list from a weak book as that is more or less what someone in the middle of the field would bring.

azgrim wrote:

Monster Rain wrote: I only wish that it had been a five game tourney so I could have had a shot at our first place finisher.

WHAT B!%# YOU WANNA GO.

I would have liked to get that game in, yes.

I went to a 2 day event where a ringer came un on day two and ended up winning the full event they counted him as winning the first day to be fair. I was pretty ticked off first cause it was bull that he was given three wins and then on top of it his army was a space wolf army but none of the rhinos/razorbacks where fully built 80% of the marines had no arms. In an event that had to be fully wysiwyg and painted.

@cgage00: Umm, that's messed up. Sounds like that event has some significant opportunities for improvement.

We have a different way of doing it when our club runs tournires we have one of the clubs members who is there to win but if there is an odd number will drop out sorting the problem a slightly different way

yeah,

nkelsch wrote:Ringer should be unranked and playing the bottom seed.
This ends up solving itself after round 1 as often the ringer ends up playing an inexperienced person and ends up kinda going from ringer to gaming mentor...

^this

Someone has to show me how to play.

Panic...