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The shop I work for just started carrying 40k about 2 months ago and we are starting to build a player base. Once that player base is solid we plan on doing a league. The problem is my boss and I just started playing the game when the store picked it up so we don't have much knowledge on the logistics of tournaments/ leagues.

The next closest shop( about an hour and a half drive) runs theirs as 2 tournaments a month with the points starting at 500 and increasing with each tournament. Is this the normal way to do it. We were thinking of allowing players to do one league game a week with a set amount of points going to the winner of each game and just keeping track, however we are unsure on what we should do for army value restrictions.

Also just in case this post is on par with the section, sorry I'm fairly new to Dakka.

My experience from surveying our community here is that the majority of players aren't interested in playing at less than 1000 points. Below that you're really constrained in what cool toys you can bring and the gameplay has a different dynamic. Some armies may even have trouble fielding valid armies below 750 points. A lot of people (including myself) are huge fans of smaller games, and even special rules variants like Combat Patrol and Kill Team, but to my surprise I've found that a lot of people just aren't into it.

At 1000 points you can probably bring a cool thing or two and people can probably field the core of what they'd bring for a more typical, larger tournament. Personally I'm a big fan of 1000 point games as they play fast, you can reasonably play them on either standard 4x6 or 4x4 tables, and it just naturally limits a lot of the standard balance questions endemic to 40k at the moment. It's also not that time consuming or expensive to acquire, put together, and paint 1000 points for most factions.

So, I definitely see an argument for starting even smaller, but I'd recommend thinking about starting events at 1000 points for a community just getting started.

The only problem I see with starting at 1k is that we only have a handful of players and the majority of them are just getting into the game. I'm sure the games at 1k would be fine but later in the league once the points are higher we don't want to make the new players feel like we are forcing them to buy more product to play. With the player base and community around the store we can't afford to lose customers by making them quit due to feeling like the cost of the game is too high.

Just so you have an idea of what the area is like, our last census was in 2010 and we had a reported population of 3,292.

 FenixPhox wrote:
The only problem I see with starting at 1k is that we only have a handful of players and the majority of them are just getting into the game. I'm sure the games at 1k would be fine but later in the league once the points are higher we don't want to make the new players feel like we are forcing them to buy more product to play. With the player base and community around the store we can't afford to lose customers by making them quit due to feeling like the cost of the game is too high.

Why do you have to increase the point limit? Just play 1000 point games for the entire league, and only go up at some indefinite point in the future when people want to play bigger games and have the appropriate models.

 Peregrine wrote:


Why do you have to increase the point limit? Just play 1000 point games for the entire league, and only go up at some indefinite point in the future when people want to play bigger games and have the appropriate models.

I guess that is a fair point, I know there is interest in a league where the points increase as we go but there is also players that wouldn't be able to keep up with it. I just need to figure out a solution that would keep everyone happy lol.

Yeah, a league doesn't necessarily have to escalate over time. That's certainly fairly common and an interesting structure, but not an intrinsic aspect.

A lot of organizers put forward escalating leagues as an approach to enabling players to build an army over time, much like you (the OP) are. There's definitely some truth to that, but in some ways I think it's just as enabling to say "Ok, we're going to start on this date, have a 1000 points ready by then." and then people can focus on getting that done to whatever schedule they want beforehand, and then focus on the games during the actual league. For a lot of people army building vs playing is a hard tradeoff week-to-week in terms of available free time, so combining both can be rough and not super feasible depending on the league's time scale. A lot of people also build armies in batches and spurts, in part because it can be more efficient, so adding a few points going along doesn't actually help those people.

But certainly it could make a lot of sense to have smaller semi-organized games for a while before the league starts, so people can try out subsets of their army to get them together. If everybody's new and game for it then that can certainly be incorporated into the league, and I certainly don't want to discourage that. I'm just saying it's worth keeping in mind that most people consider 40k below 1000 points to be a pretty different game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Another thought is that in a league format, as opposed to a single-day tournament, you don't necessarily need to have a fixed points limit. To me a league means people have some time period in which to execute their assigned matches, though there's often a particular night or whatever where people are generally getting together to do so. In that setup you could easily just let each pair decide what points level to play at, going with whatever is the lowest points each player feels comfortable fielding, at or above some minimum set for the league. That way people still working on armies can participate, while others racing ahead can start having bigger games.

There's some potential issues there about the integrity of the overall standings, because depending on mission setup, larger games might be able to score more points, and so on. But you can easily solve that by awarding league points based on outcomes rather than just straight sums of points, which you may be planning to do anyway. This is a pretty standard question in overall competitive event design, and both styles are common. So, instead of just accruing victory points, you could for example award:

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Crushing victory (opponent wiped out or beat by at least double the victory points): 9 league points to victor, 1 to opponent

Victory (more victory poins): 7 league points to victor, 3 to opponent

Draw (tied victory points): 5 and 5

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Note that especially in a league format I think it's worth awarding some points even for major losses because it awards and encourages continued participation. Obviously though many such points schemes are possible.

The key thing though is that by effectively normalizing points at the league level, you largely deal with any potential issues created by matches within a round being held at different points values. Especially in a casual context where everybody's just beginning, I don't see any reason a flexible format like that couldn't work out fine, and still bring some competition and drive into the scene.

That is very true, my first game was 500 pts and my second 750. After getting some 1k+ games under my belt under 1k seems way harder to build an effective army for.

Structure of the league is also a problem at the moment. Do we just make pairing for the week or run a tournament and award league points based on position?