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 Brothererekose wrote:

What events have you played that use the EW missions format?

Would you mind giving a couple of examples of "alt-40k" events? Did you mean events that use ITC and NOVA missions? Or, as I read your posts, it seems that the 'alt-40k' is something other than the ITC/NOVA missions.

The alt-40k is a reference to things like NOVA/ITC, in that various complex missions and comp rules are used and therefore it’s a variant of 40k with it’s own meta rather than 40k ‘by the book’.

I played the Warhammer World doubles this year. Missions straight out of Chapter Approved 2017.

 Dashofpepper wrote:
OP:

I would encourage you to change your rule from "You must provide a hard copy of your army list to your opponent before the start of the battle" to "You must bring 4 printed copies of your army list."

The former gives room for players to hand-write a hard copy, show it to their opponents before the game, but not leave them with a copy of it, and your rule doesn't explicitly clarify it. I've seen that abused through laziness so many times. If you've having a three round tournament, they had better have a copy for the TO, and three copies to hand out to their three opponents - typed, not hand-written.

If you want to ensure accuracy, you can require them to submit their army lists in army builder, or submit them to you 48 hours in advance so that you can input their armies into army builder and check their validity.

Dash, you're a bit behind on the times.

When registering for Best Coast Pairings events, players submit or take a picture that is stored on the app. Once pairings are up, an opponent can see the list on their phone (anyone in the event, actually), with continuing better, legible, photo quality. Now, I still agree with you that a hard paper copy during the game is a good (great!) idea, and I would require this, if I were running events.

However, the 'give a list to your opponent' not the practice I've experienced for several years now, RTTs and GTs.

Army Builder's reputation (as far as I hear) continues to be spotty on accuracy ( and has too may plus signs and extraneous info ).

Submitting lists for scrutiny by the TO crew is totally impractical. There have been many articles on the various 40k websites by judges. Consider the staff/man hours needed to check LVO's upcoming roster. Asking a new judge or a new Tourney Official to check lists implies he has the umpteen codexes, and Chapter Approved, and time to check. Even with just 20 dudes, that's nuts.

Now, using BCP (or similar list publishing media, starting a FB page for your event would easily work), and requiring all list submissions a week before a GT or event ... well now, you've invited every attendee to chime in as a correcting mechanism with no add'l weight on the TO crew.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 ArbitorIan wrote:

 Brothererekose wrote:

What events have you played that use the EW missions format?

Would you mind giving a couple of examples of "alt-40k" events? Did you mean events that use ITC and NOVA missions? Or, as I read your posts, it seems that the 'alt-40k' is something other than the ITC/NOVA missions.

The alt-40k is a reference to things like NOVA/ITC, in that various complex missions and comp rules are used and therefore it’s a variant of 40k with it’s own meta rather than 40k ‘by the book’.

I played the Warhammer World doubles this year. Missions straight out of Chapter Approved 2017.

Thanks for clearing that up, Arbitorian.

But what missions and events does Akar play?

If you don't want a whole new large package like ITC, this also works, tried and true for years:

Scenarios are one Eternal War and Maelstrom of War combined. For example, Tactical Escalation + Dominate & Destroy which are played simultaneously. Usually 3 Maelstrom of War Tactical objectives maximum per turn can be completed, and no duplicate objectives can be completed simultaneously (for example, no completing 2x Secure Objective 4 on a lucky draw). Use the standard Maelstrom of War -deck in the tournament, as the Faction decks are unbalanced, and eat away at the competitive nature of the event.

Set the maximum Kill Point difference to 6 (even if the other player destroys more than 10 units compared to his opponent, he only gets 6 KP maximum).

You want armies that are geared towards holding objectives to do well, and you want armies that are geared towards removing units from the table to do well, and require lists to do both, in order to have a balanced setting.

Balanced being "what you can achieve with 40K".

 Peregrine wrote:

 General Helstrom wrote:
- Must be WYSIWYG except for weapons/upgrades

This doesn't make any sense. WYSIWYG is primarily about weapons and upgrades, why would you have a WYSIWYG rule that doesn't include them?

- Custom tournament mission revolving around kill points only: no objectives, no cards

This alone makes it a non-competitive event. Kill points only is an extremely poorly balanced mechanic and reduces the list of viable armies to death star lists built to minimize their total unit count (and therefore the maximum points that can be scored by the other player). Look at existing competitive event mission packs for ideas here, but the general idea is that you want a mix of kill points (rewards death stars, punishes MSU) and objectives/area control (rewards MSU, punishes death stars) so that any single mission might favor a given army but the average of the whole day won't.

- Three rounds

Also non-competitive unless you have a very small event. The general rule is to play enough rounds to have a single undefeated player at the end, and for all but the smallest events that's going to be at least 4-5 rounds. Having too few rounds means that standings come down to tiebreakers, and the winner is usually the best seal clubber who gets matched up against a newbie in the first round and runs up a huge margin of victory.

Would chess timers work?

No. 40k is not a game where it is clear whose clock should be running because there are too many cases where you are doing stuff during your opponent's turn or there's a legitimate argument for each player's clock for a given action. For example, do you switch the clock back and forth to roll saves? If not you have an easy way to stall and exploit the system, if so you have a ton of tedious clock swapping and it makes it very easy to miss a swap. If there's a question of LOS whose clock runs, the player who claims LOS or the player who disputes it? If there's a rule disagreement whose clock runs while someone gets out the codex to answer it? Etc. It's just not worth it. DQ anyone who is obviously stalling and be done with it, you don't need a convoluted system for something that is ultimately a subjective judge opinion anyway.

Have you started attending tournaments yet?

 Brothererekose wrote:

When registering for Best Coast Pairings events, players submit or take a picture that is stored on the app. Once pairings are up, an opponent can see the list on their phone (anyone in the event, actually), with continuing better, legible, photo quality. Now, I still agree with you that a hard paper copy during the game is a good (great!) idea, and I would require this, if I were running events.

However, the 'give a list to your opponent' not the practice I've experienced for several years now, RTTs and GTs

Whaaaaa....

Are you telling me that a a smart phone or tablet with a specific app and internet access are additional requirements for tournament play? Have the people making these decisions added some other wishlist items to mandatory tournament play? Deodorant? Shoes? Open bars?

the "make copies to give to your opponent" is still a thing. However in "most" cases Tournaments have moved on from pre submitting lists. Its generally to labor intensive to run these lists through. Thats where Apps like BCP come in play to help out. You upload your list and basically everyone at the GT can see it.

Everyone generally has a Smart phone in this day and age...apparently in some cases they are more common than Deodorant or soap.

 zedsdead wrote:
the "make copies to give to your opponent" is still a thing. However in "most" cases Tournaments have moved on from pre submitting lists. Its generally to labor intensive to run these lists through. Thats where Apps like BCP come in play to help out. You upload your list and basically everyone at the GT can see it.

Everyone generally has a Smart phone in this day and age...apparently in some cases they are more common than Deodorant or soap.

Yeeah, wut dis dood sed.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Dashofpepper wrote:
Whaaaaa....

Are you telling me that a a smart phone or tablet with a specific app and internet access are additional requirements for tournament play? Have the people making these decisions added some other wishlist items to mandatory tournament play? Deodorant? Shoes? Open bars?

Yer damn, right.

*if* I was the Lord-King-God of tourneys, deodorant, shoes and opens bars would be first, before smart phones, and tablets, with specific apps, for tourney play.

Fo'
Sho'!

 Brothererekose wrote:

 zedsdead wrote:
the "make copies to give to your opponent" is still a thing. However in "most" cases Tournaments have moved on from pre submitting lists. Its generally to labor intensive to run these lists through. Thats where Apps like BCP come in play to help out. You upload your list and basically everyone at the GT can see it.

Everyone generally has a Smart phone in this day and age...apparently in some cases they are more common than Deodorant or soap.

Yeeah, wut dis dood sed.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Dashofpepper wrote:
Whaaaaa....

Are you telling me that a a smart phone or tablet with a specific app and internet access are additional requirements for tournament play? Have the people making these decisions added some other wishlist items to mandatory tournament play? Deodorant? Shoes? Open bars?

Yer damn, right.

*if* I was the Lord-King-God of tourneys, deodorant, shoes and opens bars would be first, before smart phones, and tablets, with specific apps, for tourney play.

Fo'
Sho'!

You are hereby appointed the Lord-King-God of tourneys. Ensure that tournaments have deoderant, shoes, and most importantly...liquor.

 Brothererekose wrote:
But what missions and events does Akar play?

I don’t currently attend events for a variety of reasons. Mostly because I work two jobs and have other obligations and priorities. One of the top reasons is that there hasn’t been an event worth attending. In those rare times where my schedule lines up to be able to attend an event, all I can find are Alt-40k, specifically ITC. I’ve attended a few ITC events, and will randomly play the missions when someone who is going to one wants some practice, but haven’t been to any major event in years. Why? It’s not fun or enjoyable. I’m not going to spend my personal time and money, to go out of my way to attend an event, with I list that I don’t want, to succeed in a format that is irrelevant. No one should be expected to.

As for missions. I’ve been playing mostly Eternal War. This is largely due to the number of new players at my FLGS that have gotten into the hobby. They’re still learning the rules and most of them don’t own more than the Start Collecting plus a unit or two. The EW missions are simple enough to play the game while still showing that there is more than just ‘Lets kill each other’. Some of them have already picked up on the major problem with EW, and that is that they only really matter when the game is going to end. This has been a problem with EW since at least 3rd ed and most likely sooner than that.

I prefer Maelstrom though as it’s been the most rewarding. There were issues with it in 7th, but it was the first draft of it. I played the ITC Maelstrom to see if it was a solution, but it wasn’t even Maelstrom as it stripped too much from what Maelstrom was. Most of the issues were addressed when 8th got released. The only one that I felt wasn’t addressed was game size. The smaller games were, and still kind of is, an issue with Maelstrom now, only because the likelihood of seeing a variety of units in smaller games was problematic. As a personal rule, I generally won’t play Maelstrom under 1500 points. Over 2000, I usually won’t play anything but Maelstrom. I’m hoping the new CA18 missions address this, but won’t know until I get some personal experience with them.

——
On topic again.

My issue isn’t with Alt-40k, or those that choose to play it. It’s when they believe that it it is superior, or that it is a requirement/qualifier to being a good 40k player. There is an attitude toward non Alt-40k players by those who support Alt-40k, that they aren’t good or have no idea what they’re talking about. Being a top ranked ITC player, makes you a good ITC player. This doesn’t mean that those players are bad 40k players, just that being a ranked player is no indication of how good, or bad, someone is at 40k.

This is something that Reecius, MVBrandt, and a few others DO NOT enforce. They’ve always been ‘play how you want’, and have never aggressively mocked those who don’t enjoy or support their formats. It is something that needs to be emulated by their supporters. The starting point would be to acknowledge that there are great 40k players who do have their own opinions on how the game should be played, and create events that don’t force them into something that they don’t agree with. Especially when those formats have excluded them from having any input. The ‘Resistence is Futile - You will be assimilated’ attitude of Alt-40k isn’t working.

Edit:
https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/768038.page

You’ll see in this thread that I’m not alone. There are others who don’t feel that the ITC is any better than 40k, or that it has made any improvements. They’ve also addressed some of the points I’ve brought up here. There are also some Alt-40k players in there who are still pushing for an environment where removing random elements somehow equates to being more Competetive.

While threads like these ARE the place to discuss it, when it comes down to finding actual events, it’s difficult.

"One idea that's been floating around is to organize one or more hardcore "Thunderdome" competitive tournaments.....

What would you want to see in a purely competitive tournament?"



I am just getting back into the hobby after about a decade of very infrequent play, but I used to sponsor various types of tournaments for at least a decade prior, and participated as a player in tournaments sponsored by others. The following largely generic suggestions might be of use to you, General Helstrom:


1. Find out what kind of tournament your area community prefers! Certainly ask your best players, your regular players! What do they think about "Thunderdome" and "competitive"? What does their collective wisdom inform you of? I learned after awhile to design my tournaments with their desires in mind, and conversely have attended tournaments where clearly those sponsors did not solicit prior input, and to me their tournaments were often very unevenly enjoyed. Get your folks to share in building a tournament that they all will shape, attend and enjoy!

2. Generate a rough draft of the rules and conditions, and then circulate it widely to all likely participants. Have them submit further recommendations and criticisms. Incorporate accordingly.This fine-tuning will go a long way in eliminating excessive argument and rough sportsmanship come tournament day.

3. Make very clear well in advance what the dispute-resolution mechanisms are, and the penalty for unacceptable behaviors. Your regular players will know such things well enough, and should ALL agree to the terms!

4. Awards! Awards! Awards! Be sure to offer prizes and such for the desired behaviors/outcomes! A buy-in became a regular requirement, with participants kicking in typically $10 minimum, and many different prizes were awarded, some of which were determined by the participants themselves, by voting on, say, the best sportsman, the best-painted army, the most heroic outcomes, etc, etc, etc! Be creative, and tailor to your community desires! The largest single prize in my tournaments went to the overall winner, and then on down to the second and third place finishers. Find out what your regulars like and will support, and incentivize accordingly!

5. Ask participants for after-action written suggestions! Have them email or submit pre-formed feedback sheets about the whole experience, and what they particularly enjoyed as well as disliked! Incorporate into future tournaments accordingly!

6. As sponsor, be firm, fair, fun, and fearless! HAVE A GREAT TIME!!!


All the best! Love and fierce carnage,

Big Rob of Death, Hello?

I haven’t read through, but I have said to friends I would play 40k if it was legitimately competitive.

- times turns. 15-20 mins a turn with a single 5-7 minute extension.
- if it doesn’t fit it doesn’t go. By that, I mean no wobbly model, no ‘placing it here and I can attack there’ part of tactics should be how and where you place your models.

Get these core rules in at the very least.

Don't forget all terrain must be unpainted Styrofoam

 Dashofpepper wrote:
You are hereby appointed the Lord-King-God of tourneys. Ensure that tournaments have deoderant, shoes, and most importantly...liquor.

Sigged!