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I'm really confused about what you're trying to say.

Are you suggesting a ranking system that always pits winners vs winners, and losers vs losers?
Okay, fine.

So how do you determine the winner of the tournament? The sample size of games across a tournament is so small that you will have multiple players finishing undefeated.

MorglumNecksnapper wrote:

I don't see this as a problem that needs to be solved. The player in question looks at the tournament as a whole and did his upmost best to win the tournament.

Someone else posted that it is not much different than pulling punches to kill units in another round for grind them down points and I think it's an apt comparison. Instead of confining this tactic to a game he used it for the tournament as a whole.

Once sportteams qualify for the next round in a tournament and still need to play some games they also put in the B-team. Or once the victory is sure in a game they substitute the best players to give them a rest.

One can argue the used points system might need a change if these actions are considered a problem, but I don't think anything less of the player in question.

And to stay on topic, first time I heard the term 'submarining' .

Yeah, we see this kind of thing in tournaments with group stages such as the World Cup. Sometimes you don't want to win your group because coming second gets you a more favourable match up in the first game of the knockout rounds. So if you and the other top team of the group are clear of the others and a win would put you in first whereas a draw or loss would get you 2nd? Well, you won't intentionally throw the game but you'll take the opportunity to let some of your top players take a rest and avoid risking injury in a game that doesn't matter, maybe try out a new formation or pairings of players to see how it does.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I'm really confused about what you're trying to say.

Are you suggesting a ranking system that always pits winners vs winners, and losers vs losers?
Okay, fine.

So how do you determine the winner of the tournament? The sample size of games across a tournament is so small that you will have multiple players finishing undefeated.

So the format I have seen used sometimes has a twin track.

Say you have a typical 5 game tourney.

Whatever convoluted cumulative scoring system.

3-1-0 so winners play winners, assigned randomly (no one plays each other twice, sometimes you can do it so club members don't play each other etc depending on sample size).

Tournament is run that way until round 4.

Cumulative convoluted system is used in rounds 2 and 3 for outliers. So for example their is an odd number of people on a certain score, and no one on a unique score just below, instead a group of people, where the lowest of the detailed score will play the highest of the detailed score below. or where someone has played everyone else at the same score as them already.

End round 4 if you have two top players score top by 3/1/0, either the same or more than everyone else. Those are your finalists, everyone else assigned as normal. If there are more than 2 you use the cumulative score to tie break between them.

So as a worked example, 32 (for convenience) players in a 5 round competition. End round one, 11 have three, 8 have one, 11 have zero. 10 of the top group are randomly assigned, and the lowest cumulative score plays the highest from the ones that drew. If there are identical cumulative scores you randomise between the lowest/highest depending on what you need.

End round 4 you have one guy with a perfect score of 12 and two with 10. They would play the guy with 10 who has the highest cumulative score.

This way you always have to a) win and b) get the highest score possible, so gaming things is harder.

I take it by 3/1/0 you mean 3pts for a win, 1 for a draw, and 0 for a loss?
4 tied games for 11 wins is pretty unlikely in 40k from my experience.

What's this cumulative score?

To have an actual distribution of scores I would need to go find a round by round 40k tourney and calculate it all which is more effort than required to illustrate a two track system.

Track one - 3/1/0 results from game sot place people.

Track two - a cumulative score that adds up through the tournament. This can be anything. They seem to vary tourney by tourney. Some might do VPs from games, others might have a conversion table of VPs to scores or a count of dead units, or whatever.

The point is your round opponents are those doing as well of you in raw win/loss/draw but your final tourney score and the factor used for tiebreaks, determining round 5 placements if necessary, etc etc is your total more detailed score.

So you want to a) win and b) get as high a score as possible. This is meant to avoid the incentive to game VP totals. Not sure how else I can explain it. If anyone else follows this could they try to put it differently?

But the problem with that cumulative score is exactly as I described - gives an advantage to those people who were randomly selected for easier games early on. As they'd get lots of VP in those early games.

Yes and the chance of that decreases rapidly due the required numbers of lesser skilled players, and from anecdotal experience is not as high as round two and sometimes 3 matchups with people who were simply very lucky in the previous game. Indeed you are possibly going to get better matchups because often one new player fighting another does have a far bigger different in points than a game with an average player vs a good one, so that system can be even more imbalanced round 2.

The fact that it becomes less common later on isn't that important if you still use results from those first games to determine the final victor.
Because the advantage they got in the first game will still be counted in their cumulative score, regardless of whether or not they got the same advantage in later games.

beast_gts wrote:

MaxT wrote:
Does anyone have a link to the tournie rules where this occurred please? I’d like to read em and how they do the scoring

I think it was this tournament (“THE BOLTER” Into the Hellstorm 5 Tournament ), so this is the rules pack.

Thank you. Amazingly, it’s harder than you’d think to find out how a tournie is scored. The rulespack points you to BCP app, and BCP points you to ITC. So it’s effectively W/D/L then VPs scored as a tiebreaker, and that’s used both for Swiss pairing and for final standings. 2nd tiebreaker is SoS but with VP variations that’ll rarely kick in. Very simple, very “abusable/gameable” depending on your point of view of what went on. So Mani’s “mistake” was to be so overt about it, but this is so obvious and easy that it’ll have been taken advantage of for ages, by many people. Punishing the overt ones won’t stop it, a better scoring system would tho.

This is basically the same as in prior editions where you could leave an opponent limping around with two models on the table while you run up the score, rather than let the game end early by tabling them. It's not a desirable game state, but it's the fault of the rules as presented not the player who used them. It's certainly not cheating and the players who do it should not be punished but some sort of rules change to make it a less useful tactic would be worth looking at.

Nah. Players who do that kind of stuff should definitely be punished.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Points difference has it's own problems with determining the winner. It means if you have two equal players; one of whom spent the first half of the tournament stomping newbs and the other has been playing high ranked opponents and still coming out on top, the first guy would win when the second guy arguably gave a more impressive showing.

If someone is stomping newbs, then they'll be forcing themselves to play against the best players at the top of the ladder.

I thought Sub-marining was when you deliberately fight below your skill level against your fellow natives to avoid being drafted into the Astartes.

 LunarSol wrote:
Pairing up latter rounds by tiebreakers seems like a mistake to me either way. Like, the NCAA doesn't seed 1:16 - 2:15 and then immediately pair 1:2 the next round. If anything, intentionally lowering your score should get you thrown directly at a shark the next round, though personally, I prefer pairings to be fully random within the W/L record.

And when you don't have even w/l record so you will have somebody who won't have same w/l record? Pick randomly who gets to face somebody from lower record?

 kirotheavenger wrote:
The fact that it becomes less common later on isn't that important if you still use results from those first games to determine the final victor.
Because the advantage they got in the first game will still be counted in their cumulative score, regardless of whether or not they got the same advantage in later games.

So if that is your only problem apply another filter. Final score is (round 1 x 0.2)+(round 2 x 0.4)+(round 3 x 0.6+(round 4 x 0.8)+(round 5 x 1). Overall winning is victor on table 1, everyone else ranked on cumulative score.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
The fact that it becomes less common later on isn't that important if you still use results from those first games to determine the final victor.
Because the advantage they got in the first game will still be counted in their cumulative score, regardless of whether or not they got the same advantage in later games.

So if that is your only problem apply another filter. Final score is (round 1 x 0.2)+(round 2 x 0.4)+(round 3 x 0.6+(round 4 x 0.8)+(round 5 x 1). Overall winning is victor on table 1, everyone else ranked on cumulative score.

That hasn't removed the issue, you've reduced it. And no, that isn't the only problem.
In doing so you have created other problems. Now that later matches are more influencial to your final score, you're also disadvantaging people who have their more difficult matches early on. (Say the two top players get drawn together in the first 1-2 games).

If this system worked well enough, you'd have tournaments like football or League of Legends or something using it. But they don't, because this is an inferior system. It might be the best you can get from playing 5 games across a weekend, but that doesn't make it an ideal system.

Well we are discussing wargaming tournaments that take place typically over 1-3 days. If you have an ideal system for competitive croquet that takes place in rounds that last years it won't be ideal for us. Football leagues have everyone playing everyone else, tournaments score on on 3/1/0 and goal difference as a tie break and then knock out. All your points above apply even more to that tournament systems and yet it is seen as a feature not a bug.

Any system that has detailed scoring metrics can be gamed. Win/Loss/Draw can still be, but its harder as there is no fuzzy area between each result.

All your points would only be answered by a detailed ranking system that ensured in every round of a competition you would only play people of comparable power level.

But that is not the point of tournaments, that is the point of leagues with multiple divisions. The point of a tournament is to battle to the top table and win. Unbalanced match ups are actually a feature of tournaments open to all comers - witness the FA cup.

We in effectively have knock out tournaments, just with a mechanism to keep everyone else playing while the winners continue their battles.

What is your proposed solution to meet your objectives of stopping players gaming any scoring system and ensuring players of equal skill level with comparable round results at that stage of the tournament play each other?

I think you'll find that my original point was that the format of 40k tournaments is not very effective for determining who is the best player, due to all these problems.
We don't have knock-out tournaments because there aren't enough games to reach a singular victor. So we have to append a points system.

I have never claimed to know a perfect solution. In fact to do so would contradict my own point, because I said there is no perfect solution.

Only way i can see avoiding gaming this way is don't use tiebreaker in pairing and just randomly assign those between each other. And this makes people who futilely try to make 40k into sport(lol) go nuts.

In realm where you can't play vs each other nothing is perfect.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

What is your proposed solution to meet your objectives of stopping players gaming any scoring system and ensuring players of equal skill level with comparable round results at that stage of the tournament play each other?

I think there isn't a perfect solution, which is in itself the problem. 40k games take too long to play. That means there usually aren't enough games over the course of a tournament to have a proper tournament structure with the scoring problems ironed out. The ideal solution is probably some sort of graduated cut as used in X-Wing. In that system you have a Swiss-system set of rounds and everyone who gets above a certain number of wins progresses to a single-elimination "top cut". usually players with the best W/L record may receive a buy for the first elimination round if necessary to adjust the number of players in the second elimination round.

40k competitive tournament play is a big joke anyway, so just play the army list that speaks to you and have some fun. If people throw a match against you, use the extra time to have a beer and reflect on how lucky you are to not be a powergamer in what is an big ruse to sell models.

I honestly cannot respect the people who would do this

This is genuinely funny to me. I had joked with a friend about doing this 2 years ago and during the tournament I was just crushed in my first game but then crush the next two players in 2 and 3 turns each. Just joked about failing to the top. I am a filthy casual and didn't understand the scoring system enough to rack up more points to put me further ahead. the end result was placing 4th in a24 or 28 spot tournament. (with Index Orks.)
But I still wonder if I had scored the next two games properly or not and if not then would that have bumped me up to third or second. Doubtful. But it is both sad and amusing that other players are employing this and probably walking away with prize money or what ever.

I don't know how a TO would punish a player for this unless there was something done that made it obvious. But push them how?

Imagine if lots of players started trying to loose their first games from now on.
Too funny.

 warhead01 wrote:
This is genuinely funny to me. I had joked with a friend about doing this 2 years ago and during the tournament I was just crushed in my first game but then crush the next two players in 2 and 3 turns each. Just joked about failing to the top. I am a filthy casual and didn't understand the scoring system enough to rack up more points to put me further ahead. the end result was placing 4th in a24 or 28 spot tournament. (with Index Orks.)
But I still wonder if I had scored the next two games properly or not and if not then would that have bumped me up to third or second. Doubtful. But it is both sad and amusing that other players are employing this and probably walking away with prize money or what ever.

I don't know how a TO would punish a player for this unless there was something done that made it obvious. But push them how?

Imagine if lots of players started trying to loose their first games from now on.
Too funny.

Losing first game on purpose tend to put you out for winning tournament when you will need all wins to win it.

What he did was aim to win by small vp count. Rather than 100-0 win by 20-0,

The whole identity of Warhammer tournaments is exploiting rules to create game-breaking cheese to fight against other game-breaking cheese. If the rules let submarining work then I see no difference between that and the default game state that already exists in competitive play. The entire concept of laid-back casual play and indeed even fair play at all is little more than trampled ashes beneath the tourney meta.

To me, saying submariners inherently deserve punishment is a massive double-standard. If a TO does not want it in their tournament they can write in a rule to ban it. Otherwise, if its in the rules its in the rules. Spirit of the game? Dead before anyone walked in the door.

Bring back fluff/composition scores so that people can't get the overall win unless they make a cool and thematic army list

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
The whole identity of Warhammer tournaments is exploiting rules to create game-breaking cheese to fight against other game-breaking cheese.

Wrong. The "identity" varies from region to region.

 GoldenHorde wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
The whole identity of Warhammer tournaments is exploiting rules to create game-breaking cheese to fight against other game-breaking cheese.

Wrong. The "identity" varies from region to region.

If I meant it literally I would have said "literally"

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

 GoldenHorde wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
The whole identity of Warhammer tournaments is exploiting rules to create game-breaking cheese to fight against other game-breaking cheese.

Wrong. The "identity" varies from region to region.

If I meant it literally I would have said "literally"

Whether you wrote it figuratively or literally makes no difference. It's a really inaccurate assessment.

Honestly if your experience has been such that my assessment is really inaccurate that is great for you. Its not an argument I even want to win. I hope you never have to experience what I have witnessed.