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Best sportsmanship article I have ever read.

A little bit of thread necromancy, here, but not too much, I hope.

The argument over soft scores isn't one that's going to go away quickly, but it's worth remembering that sportsmanship isn't the only controversial soft score; army presentation is another one.

And softness isn't restricted to sports and painting. As we all know, there is a pecking order of tournament effectiveness based on different codexes/army books and different builds from those books. Composition is one "soft" attempt to address that imbalance, but there's a powerful argument - not unlike that for not scoring sports or painting - that would do away with comp entirely.

It is certainly possible to run a tournament with no comp, no sports and no painting. But if you want to eliminate all softness, you also have to get rid of scenarios, and objectives other than annihilation, and Kill Points (because Victory Points are a less "soft" measure of success).

And having reduced everything to the pure hardness, what sort of tournament do we see? A series of annihilation missions played with unpainted proxies representing, all players using the same army in the same way in a game of tactical manoeuvre...

You know, that sounds like something I've heard of...

Oh, yes.

It's called Chess.

If, on the other hand, you want to play a game with a sense of time and place, that forms a small part of a sweeping drama cut across thousands of years and millions of worlds, or on the battlefields of strange new planets, or from the cloth of history...

Well, in that case you play a miniatures wargame. And those, I'm afraid, involve a little softness.

R.

I'll make my position a little more clear for you, precinctomega: having an opponent that is competing for a position in the tournament being allowed to directly affect your score creates a conflict of interests that I have not seen yet able to be resolved.