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Went to my first tournament and learned a TON.

I'm just curious if anyone knows, or is working on an alternative already?

You talking about the missions?


If so, not that i know of. The missions are the best GW has ever put out and people are gonna use them for a while.

Since we are just getting into 9th, it will take at least till the end of the year before we can figure out if they are gonna need modifying for a more balanced tournament experience.


The most likely change i see happing is that secondaries will get looked at. They are clearly not all equal with each other, which is fine, if you earn points equivilent to the difficulty of the secondary itself. The biggest ouliers though will be that some are difficult to do and yet still award less points than less difficult ones.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
You talking about the missions?

No. I'm talkin about the GT2020 booklet that they want to be used. I'm aware that because of Nurgles current visit to our time that there haven't been that many actual events yet. I'm simply starting to look for a functional Alternative. If no one is doing one, then any ideas that I can apply to a competitive system would be helpful.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
The missions are the best GW has ever put out and people are gonna use them for a while.

This is an opinion that isn't shared by the 40k Community. I deliberately left the problems with the Mission and Tournament OUT of my original post because I do NOT want this to become a Complaint / Flame thread, that would be in a different forum. As more events occur, the problems will reveal themselves if players aren't already aware of them.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
The most likely change i see happing is that secondaries will get looked at. They are clearly not all equal with each other, which is fine, if you earn points equivilent to the difficulty of the secondary itself. The biggest ouliers though will be that some are difficult to do and yet still award less points than less difficult ones.

I'm believe we'll see a Maelstrom Mission Pack long before they ever address the Secondary Objectives, or even the Mission itself. I'm hoping it'll be closer to the 8th ed. Core Maelstrom and not the unplayable CA19 ones, but I can wait for it until then.

The 8e core maelstrom was the unplayable one. CA19 one was lot more balanced and indeed in terms of balance beats 9e scenarios easily.

 Akar wrote:

 Eihnlazer wrote:
You talking about the missions?

No. I'm talkin about the GT2020 booklet that they want to be used. I'm aware that because of Nurgles current visit to our time that there haven't been that many actual events yet. I'm simply starting to look for a functional Alternative. If no one is doing one, then any ideas that I can apply to a competitive system would be helpful.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
The missions are the best GW has ever put out and people are gonna use them for a while.

This is an opinion that isn't shared by the 40k Community. I deliberately left the problems with the Mission and Tournament OUT of my original post because I do NOT want this to become a Complaint / Flame thread, that would be in a different forum. As more events occur, the problems will reveal themselves if players aren't already aware of them.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
The most likely change i see happing is that secondaries will get looked at. They are clearly not all equal with each other, which is fine, if you earn points equivilent to the difficulty of the secondary itself. The biggest ouliers though will be that some are difficult to do and yet still award less points than less difficult ones.

I'm believe we'll see a Maelstrom Mission Pack long before they ever address the Secondary Objectives, or even the Mission itself. I'm hoping it'll be closer to the 8th ed. Core Maelstrom and not the unplayable CA19 ones, but I can wait for it until then.

So far, multiple polls with 500+ responses on various FB posts have shown 75-80% of people like the GT2020 missions as is, so the opinion does seem to be pretty broadly shared. That doesn't mean the missions are perfect, and I'm certain they'll be looked at and revised as and when necessary, in the fullness of time and as the meta actually matures (stupid Nurgle), and of course people who don't like something are far more likely to pipe up about it, which usually helps identify areas for improvement. I would think 90-95% popularity would be more preferable, at any rate. Given the fairly low popularity of Maelstrom outside ETC, and the fairly high popularity even w/in ETC of some of the changes in CA19, I would moderate expectations about GW ignoring feedback and never addressing Secondary or Primary mission issues, if time and feedback prove them out.

In terms of coming up with your own competitive format, go for it; that's how innovation happens!

I posted this in general on the discussion of anti-elite secondaries but this should apply here as well.

If your running a RTT you could fix secondaries to these, and just vary your primary objectives for your three games.

Scoring maximum would be the same as the current max (and so easily converted to ITC points if need be) and is just essentially forcing secondaries. I would not use this in a 5-6 game tournament as it would get a bit stale playing the same effective mission more than 3 times.


Sever the head- At the end of player turn 5, if you have killed both the enemies warlord and at least half of their total character models you gain 15pts.

Area Secured- At the end of each of your turns make a tally of how many table corners you control (you control a table quarter if you have more units wholly within that corner than your opponent). On turn 5 each table corner counts as three and the center of the table counts as two (the center of the table is a 9" circle in the middle of the table). Divide your total tally by 2 and you score this many victory points.

True Leader- At the end of the battle, compare the PL of the surviving units to your armies starting PL. If you have 25% of your army remaining you score 5 points, 50% gives you 10 points, and 75% grants 15 points (Always round down if its necessary).

Thanks Ein for reading / responding.

As I responded above, despite my thoughts on the Matched Play Mission, it isn't the biggest issue facing Tournament play right now. The removal of Wins / Losses is.

We already have a VERY functional replacement with the Open War Mission Pack/Deck and I'm in a group of players playing the different combinations to see if there are any outstanding Flaws. We absolutely love the Twists but they wouldn't work with the current state of the Codexes. It is entirely playable though and would shake up the tournament Meta. That said, even I agree that they have a strong impact on certain armies until/unless those armies get functional equivalent units to fill roles that may not be intended. If anyone ran a 'Space Marine Only' tournament, then these should absolutely be played IMO. The Ruses are the ones the group is divided on at the moment. They work well enough to cover the disparity between PL/Pts. It would really only affect those that try to get the highest PL out of the points available, but since that difference has less of an impact as it did last edition we won't see it until we got some large scale event result sampling. Which won't happen with the current events. Some would probably need to be tweaked, most likely based on the size of the game, but so far hasn't been an issue.

Side Comment: Sudden Death hasn't come into play since we're still playing based on points. We had a funny argument where a player could technically put enough points into Reinforcements to get the 2/1 pre-game, he should probably lose that as soon as he used the points to take him over the threshold. Though it was interesting to theoryhammer that tactic as an option. Start down to get the SD Card and actually TRY to achieve it, but if not, then blow all the points to play the mission.

 Eihnlazer wrote:

Scoring maximum would be the same as the current max (and so easily converted to ITC points if need be) and is just essentially forcing secondaries. I would not use this in a 5-6 game tournament as it would get a bit stale playing the same effective mission more than 3 times.

Sever the head- At the end of player turn 5, if you have killed both the enemies warlord and at least half of their total character models you gain 15pts.

Area Secured- At the end of each of your turns make a tally of how many table corners you control (you control a table quarter if you have more units wholly within that corner than your opponent). On turn 5 each table corner counts as three and the center of the table counts as two (the center of the table is a 9" circle in the middle of the table). Divide your total tally by 2 and you score this many victory points.

True Leader- At the end of the battle, compare the PL of the surviving units to your armies starting PL. If you have 25% of your army remaining you score 5 points, 50% gives you 10 points, and 75% grants 15 points (Always round down if its necessary).

These all sound like good suggestions but do not address the issue with how to Score in the GT 2020 pack. Scoring VP's is a great way to determine the winner of a game, but is horrible when trying to find the winner of an event. The current matched play mission does nothing to help out with the individual game, which in turn, really affects the outcome of winning an event. 9th ed is the first edition where we now need to find an alternative to the mission pack and the scoring.

Are you talking about how a potentially better player might bump into an army that lowers his overall score and so he doesnt place as high as he probably should have?


Yes that could happen. That has more to do with random matchups than the missions themselves though. You really cant do anything to prevent that.


If, however you wanted some way to reduce the chance of a good player getting sandbagged you could just use the Victory points to determine the games winner, then give that player a different overall score based on how well they won the game.



Example being:

Todd vs Manny. Todd wins the game with a final score of a mere 57 points to Manny's 28 points due to Manny's suicidal play style.

Manny never tried to play the objectives, just rushed headlong into Todd's army to deny him of his own points.

Todd played brilliantly and still managed to get a decent score, but because of his total points being below 60 he in this game he didnt manage to get into the Top 5 placings of the tournament despite being undefeated.



Currently ITC would be giving the winners 1000pts, draws 500pts, and loss's 0 pts added onto their score.

What you could do for your local RTT (which has alot less players and potentially too many undefeated players), is drop the actual VP from the game for a flat amount based on how badly they beat their opponent.

Outscored your opponent by 1-10 points? Close game so you only get 1050pts on the overall.

Outscored by 11-20 points?
Good victory gets you 1100 points on the overall.

Outscored by 21-50 points?
Smashed the opponent and you get 1150 points on the overall.


You could try something similar to this if you wanted to.

However, I personally think just using the current VP's is fine. 90 points per game adds a very good variability which will reduce ties towards the end of the tournament.

If a player themselves wants to do good at a tourny, they should build an army that they know can score 60-90 points every game. Thats part of the players problem, not the TO.

You might love your amazing deathstar army that kills anything and is impossible to kill, but if it cant score points it will not win a tournament, so dont plan on doing so if you take said army.

I'm not sure what the OP means but if it's about how someone could loose 3 games and still score more points than someone who won 3 games and thus finish higher in the final standings. If it is then just use game score as a tie breaker with wins>game score>kill points

Thats the method I use.

Theoretically, you could lose 3 games while scoring 90 points each game for a VP total of 270 points. Someone else could win three games while scoring 50 points for a VP total of 150 points. Thus, total Victory Points is a horrible way to judge the winner of a tournament.

Instead, you need to go first by Win-Loss record, then follow up with tie-breakers like total VP, VP differential (your VP minus your opponents VP on a per game basis), strength of schedule and the like.

That's an interesting idea. Your tie-breaker points are the amount of VP your opponents scored in the games you won! Rather than getting points for curbstomping newbies, you get points for hard fought victories.

 alextroy wrote:

That's an interesting idea. Your tie-breaker points are the amount of VP your opponents scored in the games you won! Rather than getting points for curbstomping newbies, you get points for hard fought victories.

Probably a little abuseable and open to collusion. I do like it better than total VP or VP differential. The problem I have with those as tiebreakers is they tend to reward people who had easier matchups than those who had to go through harder opponents.

SoS is the only system I've found that's objectively "fair". It just makes people unhappy because they don't have any way to influence their success and it can make both first round pairings and 2 loss drop outs randomly punishing at no fault to the player.

Ultimately the problem is ties themselves and that if I went X-1 and you went X-1 and we never played one another, trying to say one is better than the other is kind of useless. It's mostly a result of podium culture and the tendency for 2nd place prize support to be better than 3rd (and 4th not existing). Ultimately most game systems would be better served by appreciating that anyone with a single loss did pretty well in the grand scheme of things.

Generally speaking, the number of points scored and points differential shouldn't be especially relevant in determining a victor, unless on other metrics are available to you.

Especially with the new missions, scoring is used to determine a route to victory, not rate the quality of your game or the impressiveness of it. A 40-30 win is just as good as a 100-90.

You must also consider the fact that unless every participant's "strength" is known going in (i.e. a seeded event), there's 0 indication provided about the caliber of a win by the differential or total # of points. Which is to say, if in Round 1 I play against the best player there and beat him by 1 point, and next to me an average player crushes a beginner by 50 points, you certainly wouldn't want either outcome to be a determiner of player skill and subsequent end result rankings.

This is why Battle Points were not a very good way to evaluate tournaments in the past, and why the community moved toward w/l/d as being the primary evaluators of success.

Strength of Schedule / Win Path is probably the best "first tiebreaker," if it can be properly assessed.

That said, in smaller single day 3-round type events, you may want to investigate tiebreaker values like "# of secondaries maxed" (indicating good decision-making on secondaries you can actually score well), VP differential, VP total, # of primaries maxed, or other factors, simply due to needing a tiebreaking component when nothing else avails itself.

You also could consider, for those shorter events with less rounds, either running Incurion size in order to get more games in a smaller time period and thus achieve a clearer undefeated; or you could consider awarding a Best Overall that takes appearance / artistry into account (other aspects of the hobby) for up to 50% of your total Overall score. Failing and/or in addition to that, award a number of equal but smaller prizes to each player who finishes the day undefeated, and emphasize painting or Overall as "the winner" for purposes of closure.

Many options are available, and in some ways it is a good thing to encourage each event organizer to choose the nuance they wish to pursue for these sorts of elements.

But W/L should be the first factor for any competitive rankings, regardless.

MVBrandt wrote:
Especially with the new missions, scoring is used to determine a route to victory, not rate the quality of your game or the impressiveness of it. A 40-30 win is just as good as a 100-90.

Using the GT2020 Mission pack, this is strictly not true. A 40 pt win will not get paired off against a 100 pt win in the next round, which is why the alternative is needed. How can something provide a route to victory when pairing is done off of your performance in a game and not the outcome?

The new mission is barely playable as a intro to 40k, let alone in a tournament format. The best way to play 9th is the completely ignore the Matched Play mission entirely. I'm happy that there are people who enjoy the MP mission. There are those of us who have been excluded having input in it's deconstruction of 40k. In addition to that, not only do we have to wait for another edition for one worth attending, we have to NOW find an alternative to events that we simply ignored for the last few editions waiting for someone to actually run one.

MVBrandt wrote:
This is why Battle Points were not a very good way to evaluate tournaments in the past, and why the community moved toward w/l/d as being the primary evaluators of success.

MVBrandt wrote:
But W/L should be the first factor for any competitive rankings, regardless.

I REALLY don't follow you here. W/L should be the first factor for sure, but it was REMOVED from 9th ed. Which means that people didn't like the W/L/D system or it's just an oversight. I wasn't aware that there was even an issue with BP, but it was much better than the current system and used to reflect W/L/D. Wins were treated the same. There was a cross game metric by providing bonus BP for accomplishing the secondary objectives. The biggest issue with the original BP system (3rd ed.) was that each round win was the same despite getting progressively more difficult in concept as you filtered winners to the top.

This is one thing that was addressed pretty easily by giving more points for winning in a later round. TO's simply needed to adjust the points to insure that L/D couldn't get enough points in subsequent rounds to pass those with more W's. One of the things the ITC did well was to give this a number so ridiculous (+1000 x Rd?) so that it was never an issue. I believe it went through a few adjustments as well before it got to it's current state. Haven't attended an ITC event since 6th, so my actual experience with it ends there.

It wasn't until the addition of a 3rd set of mission objectives, and how to assign BP's to it, that the BP system started to fail. There were already other issues with the tournament house rules and this didn't help fix anything. GW has been very innovative with introducing new rules to mix up the game over the last few editions. Some obviously didn't work out. Others weren't a problem until the tournaments implemented minor rules to 'fix' something, which affected the next thing in line to be removed. The current Matched Play mission is the result of the removal of ALL of those innovations, with the addition of something that has NEVER been a part of 40k until now. We're all aware that you've had a hand in the development of 9th, and you've been recognized for contributing. If the current system is something that you've had a hand in getting put in the game, then I really don't know how much positive feedback you're going to be able to provide here.

I dont know of any major tournaments going straight off of BP's so im not sure why your finding this such an issue in 9th.

Literally every major i have looked at is giving 1000pts for win, 500 for a draw.

If you have a local TO going straight off of BP's that is something you have to discuss with him.

Giving more points in a later round doesnt work though. You could play the absolute best player there in the first round. SoS is how you take care of this issue.

Increasing the points you can gain per game, and making it so that all missions can gain potentially the same points is the best way to balance the game from an orginizer's standpoint. It reduces the amount of tie scores and makes all the missions have the same value.

If you just dont like the current secondaries then feel free to come up with your own if you run your own tournament.

 Akar wrote:

MVBrandt wrote:
Especially with the new missions, scoring is used to determine a route to victory, not rate the quality of your game or the impressiveness of it. A 40-30 win is just as good as a 100-90.

Using the GT2020 Mission pack, this is strictly not true. A 40 pt win will not get paired off against a 100 pt win in the next round, which is why the alternative is needed. How can something provide a route to victory when pairing is done off of your performance in a game and not the outcome?

The new mission is barely playable as a intro to 40k, let alone in a tournament format. The best way to play 9th is the completely ignore the Matched Play mission entirely. I'm happy that there are people who enjoy the MP mission. There are those of us who have been excluded having input in it's deconstruction of 40k. In addition to that, not only do we have to wait for another edition for one worth attending, we have to NOW find an alternative to events that we simply ignored for the last few editions waiting for someone to actually run one.

MVBrandt wrote:
This is why Battle Points were not a very good way to evaluate tournaments in the past, and why the community moved toward w/l/d as being the primary evaluators of success.

MVBrandt wrote:
But W/L should be the first factor for any competitive rankings, regardless.

I REALLY don't follow you here. W/L should be the first factor for sure, but it was REMOVED from 9th ed. Which means that people didn't like the W/L/D system or it's just an oversight. I wasn't aware that there was even an issue with BP, but it was much better than the current system and used to reflect W/L/D. Wins were treated the same. There was a cross game metric by providing bonus BP for accomplishing the secondary objectives. The biggest issue with the original BP system (3rd ed.) was that each round win was the same despite getting progressively more difficult in concept as you filtered winners to the top.

This is one thing that was addressed pretty easily by giving more points for winning in a later round. TO's simply needed to adjust the points to insure that L/D couldn't get enough points in subsequent rounds to pass those with more W's. One of the things the ITC did well was to give this a number so ridiculous (+1000 x Rd?) so that it was never an issue. I believe it went through a few adjustments as well before it got to it's current state. Haven't attended an ITC event since 6th, so my actual experience with it ends there.

It wasn't until the addition of a 3rd set of mission objectives, and how to assign BP's to it, that the BP system started to fail. There were already other issues with the tournament house rules and this didn't help fix anything. GW has been very innovative with introducing new rules to mix up the game over the last few editions. Some obviously didn't work out. Others weren't a problem until the tournaments implemented minor rules to 'fix' something, which affected the next thing in line to be removed. The current Matched Play mission is the result of the removal of ALL of those innovations, with the addition of something that has NEVER been a part of 40k until now. We're all aware that you've had a hand in the development of 9th, and you've been recognized for contributing. If the current system is something that you've had a hand in getting put in the game, then I really don't know how much positive feedback you're going to be able to provide here.

I think you're operating under some assumptions that aren't actually true, but you seem very committed to your feelings on it - I think it's important that players who want things a certain way not have someone simply argue about their feelings, and I respect yours here. With regard to the first point, however, no - W/L wasn't removed by the GT pack. As someone intimately involved in this sort of thing, W/L (which ITC played as "1000 points" for a win in any round) will be the primary scoring mechanism in most events, with the # of points earned in your win primarily just functioning as a determinant for victory (similar to Runs in a game of Baseball). Over a decade ago, I wasn't happy with what the classic Battle Point style short-round tournament formats were providing, so I started running things my own way. That led to the adoption of W/L events, ITC, etc., and I still hold a lot of passion for people innovating. If you're unhappy with the event formats available, I say - no tongue in cheek - you should experiment with your own thoughts and ideas. You may find yourself innovating the concepts that make their own way into some future GW pack, just as NOVA/ITC concepts innovated their ways into things like CA19 and GT2020.

MVBrandt wrote:
With regard to the first point, however, no - W/L wasn't removed by the GT pack. As someone intimately involved in this sort of thing, W/L (which ITC played as "1000 points" for a win in any round) will be the primary scoring mechanism in most events, with the # of points earned in your win primarily just functioning as a determinant for victory (similar to Runs in a game of Baseball).

A Straight BP system is the same as a W/L system, which made it easier to implement modifiers. It wasn't perfect, but was much more effective than a W/L with a set of global modifiers (+/-) that were to be accomplished by all players regardless of who was playing, or which mission was being played. Those secondary objectives eventually morphed into the static 3 of First Blood (and later First Strike), Slay the Warlord, and Linebreaker. The only thing that a TO needed to do was adjust the value of a W/L/D to ensure that there was enough of a spread so that a High scoring L/D would never get up to a low scoring W. Something that became easier to do when the Negative modifiers were removed and the 3 bonus modifiers simply became a yes/no.

This made it less likely that all X-0 would be the same toward the end, but as the events got larger, it probably became more and more common to find X-0 players with the same BP score. I defer to you on that point as I've never run, only attended large events. Out of the 200+ events that I attended, only 2 of them had this issue. The one I tied for overall on was based off a missing Scorecard. The other one involved a 3rd set of objectives, which affected who won, instead of modifying it.

The Current System doesn't give us ANY instructions on what to do with the results, it's impossible to tell what to do from round to round. The Ninth edition Matched Play/Mission Pack/and now 'Tactical Deployment' certainly do NOT support a W/L system, and there is ZERO instruction in the book on what to do beyond calculating W/L. There is far too much tracking needed for simply determining who won a game. There is NO reason to allow one player to keep playing after they have won. Sure, if the TO wants to go off of W/L he's sure welcome to, but you end up with the same problem that W/L doesn't address. You don't have enough rounds to come to a single undefeated winner. I believe that the ITC tried to address this at one point by creating groups, then the winner of each group advanced.

There is NO way to tell who among the X-0 Players who wins an event since there are no instructions to go off of W/L or BP's, or anything else. So with the results we left to conclude that the total number of VP's determines the winner of an event. In your baseball example, that's like making the winner of the season the team that scored the most runs. Imagine if the team that won the NFL/NBA isn't the one that won the most games, but simply who scored the most. That's pretty much all Ninth is.

Even if you're going to go W/L, then tier it based off of the VP total between games which equates to the same issue. The winner of the event is simply the player who scores the most VP's among the X-0 players. It still runs into the same issue, but only among a smaller group. There would be very little motivation to keep participating in said event upon seeing that someone within the same bracket scored higher than you. By either scoring, each round should pair you with an equivalent opponent, so you scores become less variable with each round. If this isn't the case, then how do you deal with someone winning a game and NOT going for max VP's to skew the results of the next round?

-----

MVBrandt wrote:
If you're unhappy with the event formats available, I say - no tongue in cheek - you should experiment with your own thoughts and ideas. You may find yourself innovating the concepts that make their own way into some future GW pack, just as NOVA/ITC concepts innovated their ways into things like CA19 and GT2020.

That's why I posted. As someone 'intimately involved' with the current system, again, I'm not sure what information you can provide. I can't think of any Innovative ideas that have managed to get into the game. Unless the innovative idea was to remove all of the innovations of the last few editions? If that's the case, then we should continue on that path, and ignore the 'innovations' of ninth. Since the Mission used has successfully removed 40k from 'Competitive 40k', we should start there. However with the current system now actively removing the 'Competitive' part of the equation, we need to start there before we can build some missions to utilize that.

MVBrandt wrote:
I think you're operating under some assumptions that aren't actually true, but you seem very committed to your feelings on it - I think it's important that players who want things a certain way not have someone simply argue about their feelings, and I respect yours here.

MVBrandt wrote:
Over a decade ago, I wasn't happy with what the classic Battle Point style short-round tournament formats were providing, so I started running things my own way.

This is off topic, but I felt that I needed to respond. You're pointing out that I wish the game to be played a certain way, then argue that your feelings on the way the game should've been played are now how everyone has to play the game?

GW listened to the 40k community and gave us plenty of innovations, especially 6th, 7th, or even 8th. The Dual-Primary mission wasn't included in any of them. The GW guys probably had many meetings on why events weren't playing 40k, and have finally given up and handed over the reigns to those like you. Ninth is the first edition where we've had a Dual-Primary mission a part of the actual game outside of events. Events that have excluded people who don't attend their events from providing feedback to making them attractive to everyone. Why would they need to? They had found a common set of house rules to attract enough players to sell out. No one wants to hear that their innovations aren't being implemented, which is what the Competitive Community has done for several editions now. You're now in that position. I'm fully confident that this won't affect you going forward, but you're not going to get the approval of the entire community. Including myself who hasn't seen a 40k event in the last 3 editions, and looks like we'll have to wait for another one. The current one will finally be a 40k event, but only because it's everything we loved about 40k removed. My hope is that we won't have to ignore the current rules, to get some sort of change, 2-3 editions from now.

Akar, I'm really not sure what you're arguing any more.

Most tournaments use number of wins as the first criteria for determining match-ups and ultimately placing. The ideal tournament would run enough rounds to end with only one undefeated player but sometimes there are practicalities that prevent that, normally to do with the available space and time constraints. After W/L VPs are usually used as a tie-breaker. I'm genuinely curious what alternative you'd use and why it would be superior.

It's important to remember that for the vast majority of people who attend tournaments, winning the whole thing is often not the primary reason they're there. Most people just want to play a bunch of games against new opponents. No system is entirely perfect. Hell, most professional sports league systems have some fairly arbitrary tie-breaker criteria in their structure somewhere because ultimately what you need is a way to determine the winner.

Slipspace wrote:
I'm genuinely curious what alternative you'd use and why it would be superior.

I don't have any alternative, but I also didn't have a problem with the old BP System either. It hit all the buttons needed for a tournament. You had a clear objective for players to use to determine a winner. A static set of secondaries existed that every player could plan/prevent, that essentially existed outside of an individual game to offset the straight W/L numbers. Add in a Painting score and you had a fairly good assessment of ranking at the end of an event.

For some unknown reason, players moved away from that, which is fine, but I don't feel I'll ever understand why. The current system is not an improvement.

I'm looking for an alternative, and just starting to see if other players have already started to create one to get some ideas. If the BP system failed, then we're back to needing a functional system of scoring now. Once we have that, then we can address fixing the mission. If it's too early to tell because of the global situation (Covid, Unemployment, Riots, Genestealer Cult uprisings,etc) then that's fine. You can tell from the delay, that I'm not checking this very often for responses.

I ran one event so far using the current setup, Mission as well, and it wasn't effective at all. Very few players had fun, since we've been playing the actual 40k missions, and not the ITC/Nova/Alternative ones. The two players who have participated in those events clearly had and edge, but didn't do well. With no instructions on what to do with the scores, it was confusing for everyone involved to understand it. Most of these points were covered up above.

Slipspace wrote:
Akar, I'm really not sure what you're arguing any more.

I'm not trying to argue any specific point, those responses are aimed at MVBrandt, who I do not believe has anything to offer the conversation for the reasons listed above.

Eh. I'm sure we'll publish our own event formats for various sizes that help provide a framework for scoring, but win loss and total points is a pretty easy one for a basic event. I don't anticipate moving back to the challenges that pure BP formats created from a collusion and fairness perspective. There's some hostility in your perspective as well, perhaps to distract? I think if you like BP the "best," you should come up with an alternative that uses it and run events with it. Previous formats even way back in the day typically associated BP outcomes based on game results; not really any different from "wins/losses, break ties with total VP."

MVBrandt wrote:
Win/Loss and total points is a pretty easy one for a basic event. I don't anticipate moving back to the challenges that pure BP formats created from a collusion and fairness perspective.

Then we're back to the original problem where wins aren't treated equal, which started the post in the first place. Implementing W/L doesn't resolve the issue. You're going to create a pool of players who are X/0 who are then subjected to the same issue of one player having a lucky game and ending up with a Higher VP result than someone who had tighter games. Winning a game with a Low VP is going to penalize you for the remainder of the event, even if you end up X/0 with the rest of the players. In Collusion/Fairness cases, this creates an increased incentive for those players to cheat the results, especially in cases where two members from a team/group end up playing each other.

MVBrandt wrote:
I think if you like BP the "best," you should come up with an alternative that uses it and run events with it. Previous formats even way back in the day typically associated BP outcomes based on game results; not really any different from "wins/losses, break ties with total VP."

MVBrandt wrote:
I don't anticipate moving back to the challenges that pure BP formats created from a collusion and fairness perspective.

I'm not stuck on the BP system, but it has been the most effective that I have seen. I'm not opposed to an alternative, but I haven't seen one.

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For completeness to LunarSol's post, I'll include it here.

The SoS/SoV system would be a more ideal system to BP. I believe it's not used all that much because unlike sporting events, where the 'tournament' involves an entire season, we're dealing with a one day event that involves more 'teams' (individual players) than could ever be tracked to implement the system. Especially since players are often only attending one event. You could potentially create a pocket pool of 'Pro' players who attend a Majority/All of the events, but I can see there easily being an issue of them playing the same closed group of players each event, or running into the issue of them playing outside that pool. I'm not sure, but I vaguely remember the ITC trying to implement something toward this concept, where they took the number of events attended and factored that in somehow.

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A simple W/L fails because too often the number of rounds is insufficient to accommodate the number of players attending the event to result in a single, undefeated player. Any event over 200 players would need a 3 day event playing 8-9 games to find the one player. Even then you still end up with the issue of sorting out the ranking of the X/1 players beneath that. In rare cases, you have those players who attend the events to win, leaving because to them it's a single-elimination event. The solutions to that are to limit the number of seats available to match the number of rounds so that you always end up with an undefeated player, or create pods of players to create multiple undefeated players winning. Both of these solutions create more problems than they solve.

The BP system was designed and evolved to address the shortcomings of the W/L system. I'm not surprised that recent events have gone away from the BP system, but I strongly feel that one factor is not including the elements to make it work while introducing elements that would cause it to fail. The entire Matched Play section is nothing more than an improved 'Intro to everything 40k' dedicated to making the game more unplayable once you get to the tournament level. You've got a single, Dual Primary Objective scenario, with no secondary metric that can be measured between games on a global level. Tabling your opponent no longer insures that you'll win while simultaneously over rewarding the player that eliminates his opponent while already ahead. In addition to that, any element of adaptation has been removed. The objectives are fixed, which makes the different deployment Zones irrelevant as players will always be equidistant from all objectives with Terrain being the only variable fixture. That is until we read the Tactical Deployment book. In addition to committing another 18 pages to a scenario that has already had 36 pages committed to it, GW gives players the illusion that they can affect the terrain, when the end result is that a majority of the battlefields will look eerily similar regardless of which terrain pieces are actually placed.

As for coming up with an alternative? That's the purpose behind this post. While I can't see any problems with the BP system until you start playing the 9th ed. Matched Play Scenario/Rules, I honestly don't know. I'm aware of the problems with the BP system and I'm not opposed to finding a replacement. Under the current system, I can't find a way of even implementing a BP scoring setup without scrapping the Mission and extra restrictions. That alone led me to ask about a functional scoring system that isn't BP. Once we have that, then we can look at building scenarios that will work on a tournament level. I'm simply asking what other options there are before falling back to a BP system where we have 4th - 7th, and some of 8th, worth of experience to also fall back on.

MVBrandt wrote:
There's some hostility in your perspective as well, perhaps to distract?

It's not Hostility, it's frustration. Frustration that we are now forced to play the system that has excluded us in it's development, and have been waiting for an actual 40k event to attend. I didn't post looking for the benefits of a W/L system. It was not in my initial post to bring up an opportunity to complain about the current system, it's doing that on it's own. It's very telling when several players are already asking for some variation in the Scenario, and a scoring system with instructions be transparent. The year of release hasn't even ended, and the group of players who notice that will only grow. I simply asked if someone was already working on a functional alternative to build on, and the biggest response has come from the person most 'intimately involved' with the current setup.

Most of the other things that should go here, already have responses above, so no need to be repeated again. I'll keep checking back from time to time to see if anyone else has anything. Right now, I'm currently stuck trying to make the current scenario functional again for future events, using the BP system because there isn't a functional alternative.

 Akar wrote:

MVBrandt wrote:
With regard to the first point, however, no - W/L wasn't removed by the GT pack. As someone intimately involved in this sort of thing, W/L (which ITC played as "1000 points" for a win in any round) will be the primary scoring mechanism in most events, with the # of points earned in your win primarily just functioning as a determinant for victory (similar to Runs in a game of Baseball).

A Straight BP system is the same as a W/L system, which made it easier to implement modifiers. It wasn't perfect, but was much more effective than a W/L with a set of global modifiers (+/-) that were to be accomplished by all players regardless of who was playing, or which mission was being played. Those secondary objectives eventually morphed into the static 3 of First Blood (and later First Strike), Slay the Warlord, and Linebreaker. The only thing that a TO needed to do was adjust the value of a W/L/D to ensure that there was enough of a spread so that a High scoring L/D would never get up to a low scoring W. Something that became easier to do when the Negative modifiers were removed and the 3 bonus modifiers simply became a yes/no.

I think maybe you're using terms differently than other people?
Adjusting the BP via modifiers is functionally identical to a W/L w countback system.
If you're 'adjusting' scores by some insurmountable amount, you may as well just use separate W/L track? eg 1/0/0 +75BPs is functionally equivalent to the 1075BPs you would have under ITC.

The Current System doesn't give us ANY instructions on what to do with the results, it's impossible to tell what to do from round to round. The Ninth edition Matched Play/Mission Pack/and now 'Tactical Deployment' certainly do NOT support a W/L system, and there is ZERO instruction in the book on what to do beyond calculating W/L. There is far too much tracking needed for simply determining who won a game. There is NO reason to allow one player to keep playing after they have won. Sure, if the TO wants to go off of W/L he's sure welcome to, but you end up with the same problem that W/L doesn't address. You don't have enough rounds to come to a single undefeated winner. I believe that the ITC tried to address this at one point by creating groups, then the winner of each group advanced.

I'm a little bit confused.
When did GW last publish a tournament system that told you how to progress between rounds of an event?
I can't recall that being an official thing in 6th, 7th, or 8th edition.

My recollection is that all tournament systems have been derived absent from GW's input... So to say that the 'current system' somehow has no instructions or removes the instructions seems kind of misplaced?

The system that is used by all 40k events I'm aware of (and indeed, all non-40k tabletop games, and all other kinds of tournaments for sports etc) is to go off W/L, with some kind of countback based somehow on performance within the individual games.

There is NO way to tell who among the X-0 Players who wins an event since there are no instructions to go off of W/L or BP's, or anything else. So with the results we left to conclude that the total number of VP's determines the winner of an event. In your baseball example, that's like making the winner of the season the team that scored the most runs. Imagine if the team that won the NFL/NBA isn't the one that won the most games, but simply who scored the most. That's pretty much all Ninth is.

Again, I don't see how this is different to literally any other edition. And you're right - making everything a straight sum of VPs is kind of nonsensical, and everyone immediately realises that, so as far as I'm aware, no major events have been doing this for as long as I've been involved in 40k. But I never got the impression that it was a part of or even implied in 9th.

Even if you're going to go W/L, then tier it based off of the VP total between games which equates to the same issue. The winner of the event is simply the player who scores the most VP's among the X-0 players. It still runs into the same issue, but only among a smaller group. There would be very little motivation to keep participating in said event upon seeing that someone within the same bracket scored higher than you. By either scoring, each round should pair you with an equivalent opponent, so you scores become less variable with each round. If this isn't the case, then how do you deal with someone winning a game and NOT going for max VP's to skew the results of the next round?

For any method of scoring you can devise that doesn't end with a single undefeated winner, there is a theoretical way to game the system to manipulate your score. Short of an official edict that events can't have more than 2^n players, there isn't a way to solve that.
The way you deal with it is that it is self-correcting. A player attempting to 'submarine' by winning on low margins (determined by whatever tiebreaker you want) can have it backfire, as the people playing it straight and steamrolling all opponents just wins naturally with the highest score. They can accidentally lose a game. Or they just end up playing the person with the highest score anyway at the end of the day.

Maybe it's about incentive, like giving the best prize to the player that loses all their games, but the second best to the player that wins all their games.

No other tournament in existence seems to be having trouble with just matching on win/loss op, maybe the problem is you?