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I've written up a system for organized play that differs from any others I've seen. I am looking for any feedback I can get on it.

Would you play in an event organized in this fashion?

Are there enhancements I could add that would make it better?

I understand that this system isn't for everybody, but for me I think it rewards the things I want to see in organized play.

See the write up at the following URL:

http://www.theundermind.com/p/players-choice-system-for-organized.html

I have developed a spreadsheet that does all the heavy lifting for this matching system. PM me if interested.

Cheers,
Gob




Automatically Appended Next Post:
For the link averse...


40K: An Alternative to Traditional Tournaments
The objective of this pairing methodology is to incentivize players to bring an army to the table that other players will find desirable to play against.

Here is how it works:

1. Participants are required to display their models and present their army list for inspection by the other players 30 to 45 minutes prior to the first game.

2. Based upon their inspection of the armies and lists, all players will assign a rank for each opponent based upon the desirability of their army as a prospective opponent (1= best, (number of players - 1) = worst). An individual player can assign only one army a particular rank (only one army will be ranked "1", only one "2", etc). The criteria the players use to assign these ranks is entirely up to the individual player and their particular preferences (painting, composition, etc.) Obviously, there is an upper limit to the number of players that can be ranked in a practical time period. For larger tournaments, I would suggest randomly splitting the players into smaller pools of 16, then having players rank the potential opponents in their pool.

3. Using the rankings established above, the TO will determine the relative desirability of each potential match and assign a desirability score. For example, if player A assigned player B a rank of "3" and player B assigned player A the rank of "2", The desirability score of the pairing of player A vs player B is "5" (3+2).

4. Once every potential match has a desirability score, the matches are sorted by that score best to worst. Pairings involving players who ranked each other relatively more desirable will be at the top of he list and players who ranked each other relatively less desirable will be at the bottom of the list. At this point figuring out the pairings is simple. Just start at the top of the list and work your way down. The top pairing will be automatic. Every subsequent pairing is automatic provided that it does not conflict with an entry higher on the list (in which case it should be bumped to a later round). Pairings proceed in this fashion until every player has a match established for every round.

5. Scoring can be based on whatever you like: win/loss, kill points, victory points, whatever. It differs from traditional tournaments as there is no shuffling of players based upon the result of the previous round.

If you run the numbers, you will find that the players who bring the armies that other players find most desirable as opponents will be the players with the most influence on who they play in their pairings. This is a powerful mechanic that will have a major impact on the meta-game once its implications are clear to participating players. Players are incentivized by the tournament organization itself to bring armies to competitions based upon what potential opponents will find fun to play against. As such, the net "fun" factor should be increased.

What about those players who really enjoy playing the traditionally optimized lists? They aren't any worse off than before. They will probably be matched against harder opponent lists as the fluffier armies will likely rank "hard" lists as less desirable opponents. The playing field is leveled by self-selection.

Here some additional benefits:

There is no need for a composition system.

There are no painting requirements or scores.

There is no need for sportsmanship scores.

There is no need for the TO to fumble with brackets between games. All pairings can be established beforehand.


Questions and Answers:

Q: Couldn't a group of players conspire to rank each other highly such that they would play each other and then throw their games to one person such that he could claim a particular prize?

A: If one player plays exclusively against his shills, he could arrange to win every game. His shills wouldn't fare well as they would be required to throw games. One answer would be to randomly assign players to different pools for match-ups. Players would not know beforehand to what pool they would be assigned. If the conspirators are not assigned to the same pool, they would not be in a position to play one another. As such, tournament rigging would not be feasible. Additionally, if the top prize amount were limited to (number of rounds X the entry fee), it wouldn't pay anyway to even attempt such shenanigans as it would cost more for the shills to enter than the top prize would be worth.

Q: The tournament winner is not determined through matching winners with winners. As such the ultimate tounament victor may not be the person who plays against the hardest lists.

A: This is intentional. The match pairings are determined based upon player preference in order to incentivize players to bring armies to the table that their opponents will find interesting and enjoyable to play against. Matching winners to winners defeats this purpose.

The flaw of this system is that you're assuming that your average tournament goer understands all of the 40K rules and meta enough to accurately weigh the various strengths and weaknesses presented to him (and he must do it in a short time period).

Plenty of 40K events have been running successfully with no comp and have had a variety of builds at the top tables. I don't think there's a problem that needs fixing.

Adding extra layers of game to game isn't something I like to see. Especially when said gaming seems designed to encourage general human stupidity, prejudice, and good old fashion ignorance coming into play.

... though I'd have no problem if I was paid.

The system here isn't the first problem I see here. It's time.

Assume players arrive between 9 and 10, and set up their armies.

The judging of numbers can't really happen until all armies are set up, each player sees the armies, looks at the lists, and makes his choices. Minimum 1 hour for this. More like two if it was 50 people. Players will be walking back and forth trying to decide how to assign their numbers.

Oops, forgot, add a 1/2 hour since you need to check people in, assign them a number and a spot to set up, and make some placard to state the armies number, player, etc.

Hmm, better make this event totally painted so we can see what everything is.)

Anyway, so I arrive at 9am, since I like to be there on time, we judge armies for two hours from 10 to noon. And finally get to game one after all the data is typed in. 30players = 900 numbers to type in. 50 players = 2500 numbers to type in. Lets have lunch, start round 1 at 1pm.

8 person tournament? interesting. More than that, it breaks down due to time needed.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Hmm, and how do you match up round 2? round 3?

Personally, I would love to try this out! I didn't quite get the mechanic, though. Let's say there are 6 players: P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, P6.

Do they have to rank their opponents 1 - 5? I'll assume yes. The chart below shows what rank each player received in their column (P3 received 2, 1, -, 3, 2, 1) and what they voted for in their row (P3 voted 2, 4, -, 1, 3, 5). The dashes are obviously where they would have voted for or received a vote from themselves.

_____P_____P_____P_____P_____P_____P
_____1_____2_____3_____4_____5_____6

P1___-_____5_____2_____3_____1_____4
P2___5_____-_____1_____4_____2_____3
P3___2_____4_____-_____1_____3_____5
P4___2_____4_____3_____-_____1_____5
P5___1_____3_____2_____5_____-_____4
P6___4_____5_____1_____2_____3_____-

Players seem to think, generally, that P3 and P5 are desirable for most of them to play against. P2 and P6 are mostly undesirable. And P1 and P4 are a really mixed bag- perhaps lopsided lists leaning towards a certain style of play that some players ranked high thinking their army will match up well against it, but others want to avoid it as it goes against the strengths of their own list.

So how would these 6 players be paired up? And as mikhaila asks, how would they be paired after the first round- in a traditional fashion, or still according to the player-chosen ranking system laid out at the beginning?

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A tweak to your idea would be to have players submit their lists ahead of time, and then a week prior to the event rank the desirability of their opponents' lists (thereby making the lists public beforehand as a side effect). It would be hard to get everyone to do so, but it might make it go faster. This would obviously rule out painting or appearance as a desirability factor in players' minds, and make it list-only (Edit: Or as an option, players could be given the choice to submit an army shot/picture with their list, if you wanted them to be able to show off their appearance). But it would also speed things up a Lot the day of the event!

People forgetting to vote beforehand would have to hurriedly rank their opponents based on a summary list handed to them as soon as they arrived to register the morning of the event, so that pairings could be set up. This would make it much more advantageous for them to rank their opponents beforehand, where they could view the full lists and consider their options more fully.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mike, I'd love to see one of your FluffyCons try this out... so much so that I'll put out a standing offer that if you ever Do want to try these rules or something similar, I'll drive up and be volunteer staff for the event (printing out lists ahead of time, since players will be bound to them, helping get things sorted the morning of, and going around and checking that players' armies match the submitted list as they play).

The main hurdle would be people not submitting a list at all- in which case they would simply be relegated to one of the harder match-ups, I guess? What would be better is if they had to submit a list in order to register/pay, but had up until a month prior to the event to submit a revised list. After that they'd be set and voting would begin.

I think I've seen you mention that the problem with this is, if someone has paid for the event and doesn't have an army matching the list they submitted, what do you do? Perhaps give them proxy models? It's a tough call but a likely scenario, so a plan would be needed. But like I said I'd love to figure it out and help with it if you decide to try it

I think this could work, just not in a tournament setting/competative setting.

In an event I attend every year we do it like this:
The top half of the players (did best in the last round) pick tables to play on. They bring their armies with them

The second half of the players (who did worse last round) then get to pick their table, based on the table, the opponent and their army (at a cursory glance). Obviously this isn't a detailed inspection, and there is an element of first come first serve but it's very fast. And a quick glance at someone's army can tell you loads about their list, their mind set and their modelling/painting skill.

This doesn't solve all the problems, as the best players never get to play against each other (possibly random distribution could fix this). But it's similar...

Also, I'd like this idea even more if it determined pairings for all 3 rounds of the event. No progression up the tables, just games against the armies you said you'd like to play against (that is, if you're ranked high enough to get your choice!) and then totaling up the points at the end.

It's definitely "FluffyCon", and I wouldn't want to do it at every/most events, but I think the more types of events out there, the better . To really work I think "player choice" rankings would have to be done beforehand and not the day of the event, though.

Thank you all for the feedback, I really do appreciate it.

@leenus Like I said, this system isn't for everyone. I agree that there is no problem being fixed here, it's just a different way to run an event that incentivizes different things for a different player experience.

@dripwelquest By definition, an organized event will add "some" complexity. I don't think there is anything in this system that encourages stupidity. It's all about maximizing aggregate player satisfaction.

@mikhalia Your point is well taken. Time for the ranking is definitely something that concerns me. I had posited that 16 was the practical upper limit for each pool due to the time it will take to rank opponents. This may have been overly optimistic of me. Obviously, even under the best circumstances, there will not be time for players to do in-depth analysis of all potential opponents. In fact, I suspect that a strict time limit will be required. You could break up players into pools of 8 for such ranking. That would speed things up a bit.

Alternatively, I considered having people turn in lists beforehand, but the issue was that some players place a good deal of their enjoyment of a particular game on factors other than the list that they will be facing (painting, etc.). I suppose I could ask for lists in advance, then have people tweak their ratings once they saw the armies. At least people wouldn't have to belabor the lists and such on the day of the event. I think that would save some time.

Also, you have to take into account that since all matches are set up beforehand, you could save significant time between rounds as no further calculation or admin overhead would be required. Players could start their next match as soon as they both were ready.

@RiTides You have the set up correct. Now, you simply have to add together the player rankings of each other to find a aggregate value for each potential game. In your example, player one ranked player five as "1" (or most desirable for a game) and player five ranked player one as "1". The aggregate desirability of the potential match player 1 vs player 5 is "2" (extremely good). This is probably the highest ranked potential game and will occur in round one.

All of the other potential matches must likewise be evaluated. Once the desirability for each potential match is calculated as above, you simply sort them by this rating best to worst and start making pairings. If a particular pairing is impossible in the current round, it gets bumped to a later round. This process continues until you have established games for each player in every round.

There is a potential problem in multi-round events if a small number of players are "pariahs" who no one wants to play. In some circumstances this creates a "logjam" where a small random factor must be incorporated into the rankings to ensure matches for every round. However, the first round ALWAYS works. This problem does not pop up unless the bulk of players all rank a particular person poorly. It is relatively easy to remedy with the addition of a small random element. I have taken this into account in the spreadsheet I put together.

Thanks again for the feedback. I really would like to try this out sometime soon.

BTW, as your post indicates, this system DOES establish matches for all rounds of the event. All match-ups are redetermined before any dice are rolled.

Any chance you'd attach the spreadsheet to a post in this thread? (You can attach files to posts)

I would love to play around with it

Your answer makes it clear to me (moreso) how it would work for the first round, I'm just not sure how it could be automated for a large group of players. This is particularly true for the subsequent rounds. Seeing the spreadsheet would be sweet!

Say you play Daemons, you could pretty much completely avoid Grey Knights, now that doesn't seem very competitive as you can avoid tailoring your list to be ready for anything. You could altogether rank very all "good" armies and face only bad ones (CSM and Tau come to mind).

Remember, just because you rank another army low, doesn't mean that you won't play them, it depends upon how the other players ranked your army. The point of this system is to maximize enjoyable match-ups. The incentive is for players to bring armies to the table that others will find desirable to play against. Those who bring the most desirable armies will have the best shot at getting the opponents that they pick. Likewise, those players who bring armies that people don't want to play will likely find themselves in match-ups that they didn't pick.

In short, if you want to do well, you won't bring the same army to this event that you would bring to a traditional tournament.

Love the concept! I would totally play in this event in a heartbeat...but I'd play in just about any type of event once just to try something out, I suppose, but this is the kind of outside-the-box thinking that I love.


As a spin-off of your idea, what would you think about a tournament that kind of combined your concept with a little bit more of the traditional pairing method? One of the reasons my brain goes to this place is because I think it would help alleviate a little bit of the issue most people would have with this about it not really being 'competitive' at all, and I think it would help overcome the time constraints Mikhaila mentioned.

Basically the hybrid idea that popped in my head was something like:

Say you're having a 3 round tournament. All players set up their armies and then everyone has a half hour to walk around and inspect everyone else's armies.

You rank every army either #1, #2, #3, with #1 being most desirable to play and #3 being the least.

For your first game, you then match everyone up based on an algorithm similar to what you envisioned...If two people both ranked each other's army as a #1, for example, then they're going to play each other...if there is more than one matching situation, then it would just be a random draw between all the matching draws.

After the first round however, you do take into account W/L/D and your next matchup is now based more on a traditional formula, where if you won, you're going to play someone else who won their game as well. However, again, within that constraint you use the pre-tournie rankings to 'break ties' and essentially increase the chances of two people playing each other who like each other's armies.

And so on, for the final round, although obviously the more rounds you have the more field narrows and the more W/L/D rankings decide who you play over the pre-tourney rankings.


This way you'll still have a more traditional winner (who played through other winners) but you still incentivize players to bring cooler/nicer armies in that you increase your chance of playing other fun/cool armies, especially in a type of RTT or other tourney where you unfortunately don't really have enough games to find a 'true' winner through W/L/D.

The other thing I like about this is you really don't have to worry about dealing with painting and/or comp, as the system kind of takes this into account as well (you just have 'best army' which is going to be a combo of painting and comp and will be determined by which army gets the most #1 votes)...just throw in a sportsmanship score (if you think you need it) and *bam*, it sounds great to me!

Obviously the ideal here would be to present the tourney ahead of time as being something relaxed and chill, explain to your attendees via email how the system works and why they will benefit from taking an army that other players find 'cool' to play against.

And in fact, if you have a 3 round event with say, 40 people, you're going to end up with around 5 players being 3-0 at the end of the day, and now you just take that player's overall army 'desirability' into account as the tiebreaker and now you have an overall winner determined which intrinsically is taking painting/comp (a general concept here) into account.

Now, this system could definitely be 'gamed' by a group of players all voting each other as desirable to play against, but again I think if the tournament is approached the right way (as a casual affair) and prizes tend to be handed out more randomly than directed mostly at the 'big winner' (they'll just get a plaque or something), then I think you can try to keep people away from doing that.


Anyway, great idea! Definitely got me thinking and I'd love to hear what you think of my hybrid and any suggestions you have towards my concept as well.

@yakface Thanks for the great feedback and ideas! I'll try to respond in detail below.

yakface wrote:
Love the concept! I would totally play in this event in a heartbeat...but I'd play in just about any type of event once just to try something out, I suppose, but this is the kind of outside-the-box thinking that I love.


As a spin-off of your idea, what would you think about a tournament that kind of combined your concept with a little bit more of the traditional pairing method? One of the reasons my brain goes to this place is because I think it would help alleviate a little bit of the issue most people would have with this about it not really being 'competitive' at all, and I think it would help overcome the time constraints Mikhaila mentioned.

Basically the hybrid idea that popped in my head was something like:

Say you're having a 3 round tournament. All players set up their armies and then everyone has a half hour to walk around and inspect everyone else's armies.

You rank every army either #1, #2, #3, with #1 being most desirable to play and #3 being the least.

I see what your aiming at here with restricting the rankings to 1, 2, and 3, but unless you make people choose the same number of 1s, 2s and 3s, they will have an incentive to rank only the army they most want to play as a "1" and rank all the others "3". Even if you did, I think you would be surprised by the number of ties you would have. That being said, at this point, my system is all theoretical, so I can't say for sure.

I still think that forcing a ranking would be preferable, as it avoids that issue and provides better granularity to the player preferences. However, the time problem with my system would probably force the TO to split the players into pools of 8 to 16 for large events, such that the ranking can be completed in a timely fashion.

yakface wrote:
For your first game, you then match everyone up based on an algorithm similar to what you envisioned...If two people both ranked each other's army as a #1, for example, then they're going to play each other...if there is more than one matching situation, then it would just be a random draw between all the matching draws.

After the first round however, you do take into account W/L/D and your next matchup is now based more on a traditional formula, where if you won, you're going to play someone else who won their game as well. However, again, within that constraint you use the pre-tournie rankings to 'break ties' and essentially increase the chances of two people playing each other who like each other's armies.

And so on, for the final round, although obviously the more rounds you have the more field narrows and the more W/L/D rankings decide who you play over the pre-tourney rankings.

This way you'll still have a more traditional winner (who played through other winners) but you still incentivize players to bring cooler/nicer armies in that you increase your chance of playing other fun/cool armies, especially in a type of RTT or other tourney where you unfortunately don't really have enough games to find a 'true' winner through W/L/D.

The other thing I like about this is you really don't have to worry about dealing with painting and/or comp, as the system kind of takes this into account as well (you just have 'best army' which is going to be a combo of painting and comp and will be determined by which army gets the most #1 votes)...just throw in a sportsmanship score (if you think you need it) and *bam*, it sounds great to me!

Obviously the ideal here would be to present the tourney ahead of time as being something relaxed and chill, explain to your attendees via email how the system works and why they will benefit from taking an army that other players find 'cool' to play against.

And in fact, if you have a 3 round event with say, 40 people, you're going to end up with around 5 players being 3-0 at the end of the day, and now you just take that player's overall army 'desirability' into account as the tiebreaker and now you have an overall winner determined which intrinsically is taking painting/comp (a general concept here) into account.

Now, this system could definitely be 'gamed' by a group of players all voting each other as desirable to play against, but again I think if the tournament is approached the right way (as a casual affair) and prizes tend to be handed out more randomly than directed mostly at the 'big winner' (they'll just get a plaque or something), then I think you can try to keep people away from doing that.


Anyway, great idea! Definitely got me thinking and I'd love to hear what you think of my hybrid and any suggestions you have towards my concept as well.

I've considered what you are suggesting as well, insofar as using the system for the first round, then using the player rankings for tie breaking. I think that such a hybrid system would certainly work as well as any other system. I would certainly find it refreshing if a TO attempted something like it.

It's really just a question of what is added by having winners play winners and if that is important enough to outweigh the priority of players getting the games that they most desire. Personally, I would not feel "cheated" in any way if I had three enjoyable games, went undefeated, but lost the event to someone else who also went undefeated, but whom I did not play.

The real objective, from my point of view is to maximize the aggregate game and event enjoyment and satisfaction.

Here's what I think goes into game satisfaction:

1. The opponent's attitude and personality

2. My opponent's army selection and composition (is it a good match-up?)

3. The aesthetic appeal of my opponent's army

4. Consistent, fair and intelligent rules adjudication


Point 1 is pretty much beyond the control of the TO. I think that some method of tracking sportsmanship would be beneficial, but I hesitate to incorporate such a measure into the overal event results for fear of players attempting manipulation by giving bogus scores. My hope is that the kind of event I envision would not attract the kind of players for whom this would be an issue.

Point 4 should be a priority for any event.

By using player rankings to determine all games, I think that you can safely say that you maximize the potential of each game on points 2 and 3, at least on an individual level.

Point 2 is the one where I'm trying to mix things up the most. I want to change the nature of the competition. In most tradition tournament systems, list building for points efficiency and maximum effectiveness is the tradition. I wanted to see what would happen if this factor were toned down dramatically. By basing the pairings entirely on player choice, my hope is that I'll tend to see much different lists that are typically seen at traditional events, all without artificially imposing draconian composition requirements or other limitations. It's all about individual preferences.

Anyway, thanks again for the feedback.

Sounds cool. I want to echo Yak's comments, both in terms of liking to see something outside the box like this, and thinking it could be hybridized with a more traditional pairing system to make it less strange to competitive folks and to speed it up.

I would definitely be up for an event using these rules that was "hybrid" as well... the only downside that that's a lot of work for one round (although using it for subsequent tiebreakers in determining match-ups, or even the overall winner, is a good idea to make it relevant for more than just the first pairings of a hybrid event).

Gobsmasha wrote:
I see what your aiming at here with restricting the rankings to 1, 2, and 3, but unless you make people choose the same number of 1s, 2s and 3s, they will have an incentive to rank only the army they most want to play as a "1" and rank all the others "3". Even if you did, I think you would be surprised by the number of ties you would have. That being said, at this point, my system is all theoretical, so I can't say for sure.

I still think that forcing a ranking would be preferable, as it avoids that issue and provides better granularity to the player preferences. However, the time problem with my system would probably force the TO to split the players into pools of 8 to 16 for large events, such that the ranking can be completed in a timely fashion.

Yes, that was precisely my intention (limiting how many of each vote type you can give out). So if you had 40 people in the tournament, then you'd be giving 13 people a '1' rank, 13 people a '2' rank and 13 people a '3' rank (and of course not ranking your own army).

Frankly I don't see any issue with having a bunch of 'ties'...you'd just randomly determine match-ups from all the ties, and if there's an odd number of people amongst all the 'ties' then you'd just randomly pick one person to drop down to the next criteria of match-ups (a '1' matched against a '2' choice, if all the '1' vs. '1' ties leave one person without a '1' vs. '1' match).

If it turns out that 1-3 ranks don't actually provide enough separation, you could always make it 1-4 (1 = being armies you'd love to play, 2 = being armies you'd be pretty happy to play, 3 = being armies you wouldn't mind playing, but wouldn't prefer it, 4 = being armies you'd prefer not to play at all).

yakface wrote:
I've considered what you are suggesting as well, insofar as using the system for the first round, then using the player rankings for tie breaking. I think that such a hybrid system would certainly work as well as any other system. I would certainly find it refreshing if a TO attempted something like it.

It's really just a question of what is added by having winners play winners and if that is important enough to outweigh the priority of players getting the games that they most desire. Personally, I would not feel "cheated" in any way if I had three enjoyable games, went undefeated, but lost the event to someone else who also went undefeated, but whom I did not play.

The real objective, from my point of view is to maximize the aggregate game and event enjoyment and satisfaction.

Here's what I think goes into game satisfaction:

1. The opponent's attitude and personality

2. My opponent's army selection and composition (is it a good match-up?)

3. The aesthetic appeal of my opponent's army

4. Consistent, fair and intelligent rules adjudication


Point 1 is pretty much beyond the control of the TO. I think that some method of tracking sportsmanship would be beneficial, but I hesitate to incorporate such a measure into the overal event results for fear of players attempting manipulation by giving bogus scores. My hope is that the kind of event I envision would not attract the kind of players for whom this would be an issue.

Point 4 should be a priority for any event.

By using player rankings to determine all games, I think that you can safely say that you maximize the potential of each game on points 2 and 3, at least on an individual level.

Point 2 is the one where I'm trying to mix things up the most. I want to change the nature of the competition. In most tradition tournament systems, list building for points efficiency and maximum effectiveness is the tradition. I wanted to see what would happen if this factor were toned down dramatically. By basing the pairings entirely on player choice, my hope is that I'll tend to see much different lists that are typically seen at traditional events, all without artificially imposing draconian composition requirements or other limitations. It's all about individual preferences.

Anyway, thanks again for the feedback.

I'm not trying to say that my idea should replace your concept or is somehow superior...I'd personally love to play in an event exactly as you describe. I just think that knowing a lot of people who do play in tournaments that they wouldn't be drawn to your concept because it isn't so much a 'tournament' as they imagine it (where players prove themselves by supposedly playing against the best opponents as the event goes on). That's because the one factor you don't include in your four points above is that many players enjoy playing against other players of equal or greater skill than them, and your system does not take player skill into account for matching games.

Therefore, it is entirely possible that a player with an amazing looking army, who also happens to be a really skilled player) ends up picking 3 other amazing looking armies as his top choices, and those same people pick him as their top choice (because his army is amazing as well). Unfortunately, those opponents may not be very skilled players and may end up all going 0-3 for the tournament (assuming its a 3 game event), while he goes 3-0 and obviously wins the day because his army was amazing and was many peoples' top choice.

Now, that possibility is just part of the format, and like you say, as long as you get 3 great games in, you don't care about losing to someone else who had an easier schedule than you, and I feel the exact same way. However, most people do not feel this way and would be reluctant to even consider playing in such an event for the exact scenario I've outlined.

Therefore, I do think a hybrid concept would be a lot more palatable to a wider audience, as it would help to ensure that player skill (winning games) was also factored into pairings after round 1, which would ensure that the winner of the tournament at least faced two opponents who (at the minimum) went 1-2 and 2-1 (again, in a 3 game event) or better.


Anyway, would you possibly be interested in working on some sort of spreadsheet to calculate matchups for the hybrid system I've proposed?

I'd love to have the capability to run something like this, but I don't have the knowledge to actually create a formula to enable it myself.

@yakface

Your points are all well taken. I find myself agreeing that your hybrid idea will take less time to set up and will have better general acceptance.

I honestly had not considered the scenario you presented with respect to player skill disparities. That is definitely a factor in game satisfaction for many players that I had not taken into account, mostly due to the fact that it isn't that important to me personally. I just hope that the main objective of the system remains intact, encouraging players to build armies that will appeal to potential opponents.

I already have a spreadsheet that does the matching for my original system. Give me a couple of days and I'm sure I could adapt it without too much trouble.

I'll PM you when it's done.

Thanks Again!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I have good news! I've been fooling around with my spreadsheet to incorporate the hybrid factors that Yakface suggested above and I've managed to kill the logjam problem.

When it is done, the spreadsheet will allow you enter up to sixteen players with rankings of any value. You can use my original design, or Yakface's suggestion of limiting ranks to 1 through 3 (or anything else for that matter).

It will then create matches for the first round based upon player preference.

Once the first round is complete, all the TO will have to do is input the winners for round one and the spreadsheet will set up round 2 with winners facing winners and losers facing losers. Within the winning and losing bracket, the matches will be selected based upon the preexisting player preferences.

Likewise, when the second round is done, the TO will enter the winners and the spreadsheet will set up round 3 matches based upon winners facing winners. All games will be matched using the player preferences.

This system will allow for up to 5 rounds of play for up to 16 players. If you need more than that, you can break the players into separate pools of up to 16 players each to handle larger events.

The cool thing is, even if you don't want to use my system or Yakface's hybrid, you can use the ranking system to keep people from being matched up who travelled to a tourney together, or should not play each other for some other reason. It makes game matching a breeze.

The formulas are essentially done. All I am doing now is cleaning up the interface to make it easier to use.

I'll post it here when it is completed.

(yes, I get excited about spreadsheets sometimes....)

As others have mentioned, the idea is interesting, BUT the logistics involved, as with a lot of good ideas, end up shelving the project I suspect.

Like was said, in small groups the players tend to know each other and know who to avoid--painting and list aside--as the best players become the best by having beaten the rest of the local crowd irregardless of lists.

In large groups, orgainzing a bunch of people in a timely manner to submit accurate reports involving the inspection of a hundred different elements requires a pretty great manager. If you can organize 100 people thusly in only 30 minutes like the initial timeframe suggested, I recommend putting the event on your resume.

In all honesty, the advantage of your system is that, while you are generating a 'composition' event, the comp scores are not being generated by you, so people will not scream at you at the end of the day. If you have a good group, then simply comp score them yourself and ask your players to understand, not argue, with your decision.

Looking forward to the updated spreadsheet!