"Tournaments". You don't own the word. It's got an established definition, and you don't have the authority to change it. You're the latecomer to the hobby. You can try to change it, but that doesn't mean those of us in it already will go along.
This might be news to you, but the word "tournament" had an established definition before
GW started mis-using it. You know, that whole being in the dictionary thing. I'm not changing the word, I'm simply reminding people what it actually means. And how is playing since 2nd edition a latecomer to a hobby? Perhaps you should climb off that high horse before you fall off and hurt yourself.
If you look at the results of an actual event, the score range at the top is normally even tighter. For example, in the 2010 Adepticon Championship blue side, the top eight of us all had perfect Sports scores. On the Yellow side it’s more mixed, but the only guy who’s not within a 3pt spread is actually the overall winner, who more than made up for it in Battle points, proving my point.
OK, let's put this to the test. I created a spreadsheet to analyze the distributions of the data of the top 10 finishers for both the yellow and blue competitions. You can view the spreadsheet here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ak_2KkJADjGNdDdhWktWeUpxX1BXdUtCVThGOEFnT0E&hl=en
I added up all of the soft scores and compared them to the hard scores (battle points) and calculated the ranges, means, and standard deviations (σ) for each sample (not the most sophisticated method, but I'm not busting out mathlab for this). The standard deviations were then weighted according to ratio of possible soft score points (95) versus possible hard score points (135) in order to account for the difference (which is about 29%). Notice that your initial impression of the data that the soft scores had less overall impact on the blue set when compared to the yellow was correct. Also note how significant the soft scoring distribution was for both sets,
and how it accounted for almost the same amount of deviance from the mean as battle points did in the yellow set. This completely undermines the argument that it's battle points, not soft scores, that make the difference in tight tournament finishes.
As for tight results, anyone who’s actually placed high in one these things knows that it is the nature of the beast that a little luck in one place or another is what really separates the top ten. Virtually any of the top five or ten guys usually could have been the one to win it, with one slightly different table, or a slightly easier opponent in one round, or slightly luckier dice.
Poor reasoning. You can use this same argument to justify deciding the winner of the tournament by a die roll--hey, it's just the nature of the beast. The more luck, subjectivity, and overall
bs involved in determining the winner the less the competition was based on skill and therefore less competitive the event was. This is the problem with soft scoring and "competitive" events.
Automatically Appended Next Post: You keep saying this but I have yet to see a huge influx of people who have come out and say that they don't attend tournemtents because of soft scores. In fact according to this poll the highest percentage wants soft scores mixed in with the rest. So what evidence do you have that strong players are staying away other than "I wouldn't and neither would many other people I know"?
And according to this poll the most popular scoring format (by far) is battle points only:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/282431.page